


A winter's tale

by BecauseImClassy



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Gossip, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, Minor Character Death, Presumed Dead, Snowed In, but not too graphic, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-07-23 12:59:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 60,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16159460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BecauseImClassy/pseuds/BecauseImClassy
Summary: Matthew lives deep in the forest, alone and bitter after a senseless tragedy.Karen needs his help, after she runs away from home and meets with a tragedy of her own.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fantasy, not a historical. The culture is pre-industrial, but I am not trying to accurately depict any actual historical setting. I haven't attempted anything quite like this before, we'll see how it goes.
> 
> Matt does not have a no-kill policy, I hope that doesn't bother anyone. Some of the factors that have shaped his ideology in canon are absent here: the Catholic church doesn't exist, and Matt doesn't pay much attention to what religion there is; and the legal system is fragmented and local, with lots of criminals easily evading the law. He doesn't kill wantonly, but he will under certain circumstances.
> 
> I'll add to the tags as needed as I post more chapters.

A young man made his way through the busy marketplace, tapping the ground before him with a long staff. That, and the scarf tied over his eyes, announced his blindness to those around him. A hat shaded his face and neck from the blazing summer sun, and his belt pouch held coins taken from a dead man.

He turned his head this way and that, taking in the sounds and smells that surrounded him. The town was in the midst of its annual fair, and the marketplace was large and full of people, many of them strangers who had come from far away, as he had. Many towns held such fairs in the summer, so it was an ideal time to buy supplies for a man who didn’t want to be noticed.

At other times of year, he could only get what he needed by venturing into a town’s small shops, which were less anonymous than the crowded stalls of an open fairground. He had to be careful to avoid places he had visited before, where people might remember him. Might remember, and might ask questions.

It was risky, going among humans, so he needed to take precautions. Like only visiting cities and large towns, and not the smaller villages where a blind stranger would arouse too much curiosity. Like always wearing a hat and keeping his eyes covered, so that he could pass for human.

His horns were only small nubs, unless he grew them out in order to fight, and his thick hair covered them. But if his hair were to get flattened down by an unexpected shower of rain, they would be all too visible. And his eyes, which glowed with bronze fire whenever he grew his horns out, sometimes did so at other times, too, particularly if he was startled.

His skin, luckily, was more reliable. It never turned red except for when he grew his horns, so he didn’t need to try and keep all of it covered. He only needed to keep his hat and his scarf firmly in place to walk among humans like one of them. He could buy the things that he and his father couldn’t make for themselves, with money taken from the robbers and cutthroats they hunted.

His father couldn’t shift his appearance as Matthew could, and could never visit a human market himself without causing a panicked rush for the nearest temple. His red skin, glowing yellow eyes, and great curving horns identified him at once as a kodor, and terrified every human who had ever seen him. 

With one exception: a bold woman who had seen past his fearsome exterior to the kind heart beneath. Who had loved him, and lived with him in his home, deep in the forest on top of a mountain, and had given him a son.

Matthew knew how doubly unlikely his parentage was. If it was unheard of for a human to love a kodor, it was equally remarkable for a kodor to love a human. Kodors were solitary by nature, and usually lived alone, avoiding even each other. But he knew his father had truly loved his mother, who had died when Matthew was just a child. And he loved Matthew, as Matthew loved him, and they had continued living together long past the point when a typical kodor would have moved out and found a home of his own.

It was his mother’s human blood that allowed Matthew to appear human most of the time. While his father’s kodor blood gave him heightened senses, all but the sight he had lost; a constitution that healed from injuries much faster than a human; great strength; and speed that allowed him to run long distances in just a few hours.

He could visit a market many miles away from his father’s house, and be back the next day, traveling by night to avoid being seen. And when he and his father went out looking for a fight, they could do so far from their home, reducing the chances of any humans figuring out where they lived.

The urge to fight was part of a kodor’s nature. Some of them preyed on other creatures indiscriminately, giving humans good reason to fear them. But Matthew and his father were more selective. They looked for people who were hurting others. They always found them, if they looked long enough.

Matthew’s father often killed the people he fought, and saw nothing wrong with doing so. Matthew sometimes had his doubts, but he would kill if it was necessary to protect someone helpless. Neither of them had any compunction about robbing the people they killed, for surely the dead had no more use for money. Sometimes they gave it to the people they had saved, if they hadn’t already run away in terror, but otherwise they kept it for themselves.

In this way they could satisfy their need for violence without harming the innocent, and also acquire money enough to buy things like soap, and cloth, and salt, and foods they couldn’t grow or hunt for themselves, and iron tools of all kinds.

Now, Matthew walked through the market, stopping here and there to buy, enjoying the bustle of humanity all around him. His father had no interest in humans when he wasn’t fighting them, but Matthew found them fascinating. He felt drawn to his mother’s kind, even though he knew they would hate and fear him if they ever caught a glimpse of his father’s blood in him.

When he had finished his shopping, he made his way to the edge of the marketplace, trying not to call attention to himself. This town was large enough to have its own temple, he noted as he passed it—an island of quiet amid the steady noise of many people living together. The men and women of the priesthood had a serenity to them, their heartbeats calm and steady, their voices warm and pleasant. Kodors did not concern themselves much with the gods, but Matthew enjoyed the tranquility that always seemed to surround a temple, whenever he came across one.

Smiling to himself, feeling content with the world, he began his journey home. He would have to wait until after dark before he could run, but until then he could walk. It was tempting to stay longer and explore the town, but he couldn’t risk anyone taking too much of an interest in him. Safety lay in anonymity.

Maybe one day he would invent a suitable, human life story for himself, that would enable him to engage in more extended conversations than the brief marketplace exchanges he was used to. But maybe he wouldn’t. He hadn’t been raised among humans, and although he could deduce some of the basic rules and customs of human interaction by careful observation, there was still a lot he didn’t know, and he knew he would be an awkward conversationalist. Better to keep them all at safe distance, and leave as soon as his business among them was done.

* * *

Hours later, he was running swiftly along the road up the mountain, almost home. His father’s house was near the top, but far enough away from the road that the forest hid it from the sight of any traveler crossing over the mountain pass.

As he ran up the road, he suddenly slackened his speed and frowned, sniffing the air. He knew that scent. His father had warned him about it when he was a small boy, before he had gone blind. He had searched out a stand of the innocuous-looking shrub, so he could teach his son to avoid it. And he had done so again, after Matthew was blind, to be sure he could identify it by the smell.

“Humans call it hellbane,” he had said, “And it’s poison to kodors. Touching any part of the plant burns us like fire. And if it pierces our skin, it will kill us and bind us to the earth.” It wasn’t until he was older that Matthew had understood the full significance of the name—humans considered kodors to be devils, the spawn of hell itself.

Now, he could smell hellbane, here in a part of the forest where no hellbane ever grew. He slowed still more, fear prickling up his spine. He heard no unusual sounds, but as he drew closer other smells began to mix with the hellbane. He smelled burned flesh, and blood—both human blood, and….

_no_

He sprinted up the road faster than a greyhound, his heart hammering in his chest, his horns growing out and flinging the hat off his head.

There was something lying in the road.

_No_

He flung aside his staff and satchel and dropped to his knees beside the body, reaching out to touch the cold face.

_NO_

He felt the familiar, beloved features, the horns curving up from the head. He smelled his father’s smell, horribly mixed with blood and burning and hellbane. He heard the utter, horrifying absence of any heartbeat or breathing.

His own breath came fast and shallow as he patted his hands frantically over his father’s body, crying out in pain when he touched the thin skewer driven into one shoulder. He snatched his hands back reflexively from the burning, but continued to touch until he knew the full tale.

The skin of his father’s chest and arms was burned, the linen of his shirt scorched into holes, and the smell of humans lingered all over him. Several clusters of hellbane lay on the ground, like deadly bouquets. They must have pressed the clusters to his body, immobilizing him with pain while the skewer—an old-growth, woody stem, no doubt sharpened to a point—was forced through his skin.

How they had caught him in the first place, there was no telling. And at this point, he hardly cared. His father was dead. Matthew knelt in the road, motionless now that his examination was finished, bewildered by the suddenness and enormity of his loss. His father was dead.

After a while he brushed his fingers over the still face once again, reading the expression, the features contorted into an agonized grimace. Not just dead, but killed, deliberately, painfully. Murdered, by humans. A spark of anger flared dimly, deep inside him, but distress at the thought of his father’s suffering was stronger. A lump rose in his throat, and he fell forward across the body, buried his face against the cold neck, and began to cry.

He should have been here. Here, with his father, who needed him, not miles away from here pretending to be human. Spending the day with humans, instead of here, protecting his father—

A part of him knew that if he had been here, they would have killed him, too. But the larger part could only cry out: _He needed you and you weren’t here._

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, knowing it was too late, that the dead ears couldn’t hear him. “I’m sorry.”

He cried until he had no tears left, and then he lay still, grief pressing down on him like a physical weight. He didn’t know how much time passed, but he finally stirred out of his stunned misery when he heard the flutter of wings, and the inquisitive cry of a raven that had just landed in the road. It hopped back when Matthew lifted his head, but didn’t fly away. 

He knew that scavengers eating the dead was just a part of nature. But this was his father. Matthew pulled the scarf off his head, letting the bird see his glowing eyes, and snarled. The raven took flight in alarm, but he knew that it, or others, would be back. He couldn’t just lie here doing nothing, he needed to move the body before the scavengers could begin their grisly work.

Years ago when his mother had died, his father had buried her in the small clearing behind their house. Matthew would bury his father there, too.

And then a new fear struck him: had the humans found the house? Had they destroyed his home, as well as his father?

He gathered up his scattered belongings, and hurried through the trees. No human had ever discovered their house, no-one came this far up the mountain unless they were crossing over through the pass, and there was no reason for anyone crossing to stray so far from the road.

But then, there had been no reason for them to kill his father, either, and yet they had done it. Who could say what else they might do?

He reached the clearing, and found with relief that the house was untouched. Father must have been out, perhaps hunting for food, when the humans caught him. He returned to the road, the spark of anger kindling again, slowly growing and burning through his shocked grief. 

Who could have done this? They had come prepared, armed with hellbane. This was no chance encounter, but a deliberate hunt. But there was no reason to kill his father! He was no monster, the only humans he harmed were the worst of their kind. Those humans who managed to survive their encounters with him might well bear a grudge, but they wouldn’t have known where to find him to take revenge.

Who else could it be? There were a few towns scattered around the broad base of the mountain, but Matthew and his father had always been careful to avoid them, and tried never to be seen by any of their inhabitants who came into the lower reaches of the forest to hunt. Especially his father, who was unmistakably a kodor.

Had he been seen, after all? Had the people of one town or another realized who was living on the mountain, and decided that he needed to die? Even though he had never done them any harm?

The injustice of it only fed his anger. He had known for most of his life that humans thought kodors were devils, but that knowledge was now real and tangible in a way it hadn’t been before. His father was dead, just because humans thought he was evil. It was _they_ who were monsters!

When he reached the road, there were several ravens perched on the body, and he snarled at them furiously to frighten them off. He bent over the body, but found that he couldn’t shift it. It was stuck fast to the ground, like iron to a lodestone, and couldn’t even be turned over.

 _If it pierces our skin, it will kill us and bind us to the earth._ The hellbane was holding him fixed in place.

He wrapped his hand in the hem of his shirt and reached for the skewer, but it burned him right through the cloth, setting the linen smoldering. He cried out and let go, blowing on his hand to cool it. Next he tried picking up up two sticks, trying to pinch the skewer between them, but he couldn’t grip it tightly enough to pull it free.

Well, there was more than one way to keep a body from the scavengers. His mother had used to read to him when he was small, and had taught him to read for himself when he could still see, and one of his favorite books was a collection of tales and legends from other countries. He remembered now that there were some people who burned their dead, sending them back to the gods in a pyre of flame. He would do the same.

He gathered wood, and covered the body. He had to go back to the house for his tinder box, but once he lit the pyre it caught quickly. He watched it carefully while it burned, making sure it didn’t spread to the trees on either side of the road. He let the fire fill his senses, the snap and crackle of burning wood, the heat of it in the cool summer night, the sting of smoke in his eyes when the breeze shifted. The smell of hellbane had disappeared completely, overpowered by the smells of burning wood and flesh.

He thought of his father, alive and strong only a day ago, and it seemed impossible that he was gone. He remembered feeling this same aching, disbelieving sense of loss after his mother died, but then he had had his father to comfort him. Now, he had no one. He was alone, as kodors were meant to be, and the pain of it threatened to overwhelm him.

“Father,” he whispered, tears filling his eyes once again. He couldn’t bear to say goodbye, didn’t know how to put what he was feeling into words, so he wept silently, tending the fire through what remained of the night.

By dawn it had burned itself out, reduced to a broad swathe of ashes and charred remnants. Once it had cooled enough to touch, Matthew sorted through the remains, gathering up what was left of the body—horns, and teeth, and partially-burned pieces of bone. They moved easily, now that the hellbane was turned to ash.

He fetched a bucket from the house and brought water from the nearest stream, pouring it over the ground to make sure no embers remained that could kindle into fire again. Then he used the bucket to carry his father’s remains back to the house.

He was very tired after his sleepless night, and the running across country that had preceded it, but he was determined not to rest until he had finished his sad task. He took a shovel from the storeroom, and went behind the house, where he and his father stacked their firewood and kept a garden.

A stone marked the place where his mother lay buried, and he dug a hole beside her for his father. He dug it deep enough to make sure that no wild animals would try to dig up the bones, then carefully poured in the charred remnants and buried them.

And then there was nothing left to do. He went inside, trying not to think about the fact that his father would never again be there to greet him when he came home. He put away the things he had bought at the market, which now seemed like something from a hundred years ago, part of another life entirely. There was no one to show his purchases to, or to talk with about how each of them had spent their day apart.

His clothes smelled like smoke. He took them off, and put on his nightshirt. The smell clung to his skin, and his hair, but he was far too tired to go and bathe in the stream. He lay down in his father’s bed, and pulled up the sheet and blanket that were filled with his father’s familiar scent. Curling himself up into a ball, he fell into an exhausted sleep.


	2. Two years later

“Karen, I need to speak with you.”

Karen looked up from her sewing. “Yes, Mother?” she answered. She had wondered, this morning, why her mother had asked her to remain upstairs with her to help with the housework, instead of going downstairs to work in her father’s shop. Now, she watched curiously as Penelope Page entered the sitting room and sat down beside her.

Her curiosity was satisfied at once. Without preamble, her mother said, “Your father and I have agreed, Karen, that it is time you married.”

Karen stared at her, and only just managed to stop her mouth falling open in shock. “Married?” she said in disbelief. “But…you said I could wait…” She trailed off, already knowing what the answer to that would be.

“You _have_ waited, daughter, for years. We didn’t want to force you into a match unwilling. We were willing to listen if you preferred someone in particular. But no-one seems to suit you.”

Karen opened her mouth to speak, but her mother raised a hand to silence her. “Perhaps it’s because you’ve lived all your life above a book shop—you’ve read too many romances, they’ve given you entirely unrealistic ideas about some perfect man arriving to sweep you off your feet. But perfection does not exist in men, I assure you. And it’s time for you to pull your head out of the clouds, and marry a man here on earth.”

Karen frowned. It was true that she hoped to marry for love, but her mother had never objected to that before. It was also true that most of the other women her age in the town were married already, and many of them had children. But her parents had seemed to accept her continuing single state. This abrupt announcement was the first indication they had given that they were done waiting.

“This decision seems sudden, Mother,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice calm and reasonable. “You’re right, I haven’t yet met anyone who suits me. Why are you now determined to marry me to someone who doesn’t? What has changed?”

She watched her mother’s face closely, but Penelope would not meet her eyes.

A voice floated up from the workshop below, singing a song that would certainly have earned Karen a reprimand, if she had dared to sing something so indelicate. But her brother Kevin could sing whatever he liked—he was, without question, the favored child. He was their father’s heir, and would inherit the shop some day. 

Entirely unfair, in Karen’s opinion, since she had learned the bookbinding trade from their father right alongside her brother, and had just as good a head for business as he did. But Kevin was older (by only a year!), and so he was the heir. That was simply how things were done. The oldest child, whether boy or girl, had the right of inheritance, unless they refused it or showed no aptitude for their trade. And there was no doubt that Kevin wanted his inheritance, and Karen had to grudgingly admit that he knew the trade as well as she did.

She loved her brother, and wanted him to have a secure future. But it made no sense to her that he could stay at home and carry on his father’s business, while she was expected to secure her own future by leaving, and marrying into someone else’s business, just because she was younger. But until today, her parents had seemed content enough to have her remain here. Some younger children never married, there was no shame in it. So why this sudden push to marry her off? Unless….

She thought about how her brother had been spending his free time lately, and with whom, and found an answer.

“Kevin wants to marry, doesn’t he?” she said, her eyes still fixed on her mother’s face. “And you want me out of the house before he brings home a bride.”

It made a horrible kind of sense—their living space was sufficient for the four of them, but it was none too spacious, and would become cramped, indeed, with the addition of another adult. To say nothing of the children they would presumably have some day.

“We had always intended that you would be happily married before it came to this,” Penelope said, not unkindly. “We’ve given you ample time to consult your own inclinations. But yes, your brother is looking for a bride, and he is not so choosy as you. His eye has been caught by several different girls, any one of whom would make him a proper wife. So the time has come for you to marry, as well.”

“Just to make more room in the house?” she asked incredulously. 

“To establish you in your own home, so you can start to build your own future and your own family,” her mother answered firmly. “Were you planning on staying here forever, and never having a life of your own?”

No, of course she wasn’t. She had expected to marry…some day. When she found a man she could love, who loved her in return. But now, it seemed she was to be given no choice. “Have you chosen me a husband already?” she asked bitterly. “Since my own wishes don’t seem to matter to you any more?”

“I know what makes a successful marriage, better than you do. And whether you believe it or not, your father and I do want you to be happy. We don’t propose to match you with a dotard, or a drunkard, or a man of bad character.”

“Just with a man I don’t want!”

“We are deciding your whole future, Karen. It’s too important a matter to be decided by mere whim. We will match you with the sort of man you _should_ want—someone respectable, able to support a family, and similar to you in age and background. From such a suitable beginning, love may grow in time. There’s nothing to prevent it but your own stubbornness.” Her voice sharpened, and Karen closed her mouth on an angry retort.

She thought over the men in town who were from merchant families, and near her age. She could think of none who were not already married. What did her mother have in mind?

“ _Have_ you chosen someone?” she asked again. “Am I going to be sent away altogether, to marry some stranger in another town?”

“Nothing so drastic,” Penelope assured her. “There is a suitable man right here in Fagan Corners, though I’m not surprised you didn’t think of him, poor man, with his first wife hardly cold. But he has the child to think of, he must marry again, as soon as possible. Claire was able to find a wet-nurse for the baby, but it will need a mother.”

For a moment she simply stared at her mother, stunned. “You want me to marry _James Wesley?"_ she asked in disbelief, a gone feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had heard about Mrs. Wesley’s death, of course. Claire Temple was a skilled midwife, and few women died under her care. But childbirth was a dangerous business, and some complications were beyond even her considerable abilities.

Certainly, the child would need a mother. But it had never entered Karen’s mind to think of James Wesley as a possible match for herself. Marry him, with his cold, calculating eyes, that weighed up people as if they were columns in a business ledger? His smooth manners, so polite to anyone he wished to impress, so casually cruel to anyone he considered beneath him?

No, it was impossible. What must it be like, to live with such a man? And then she went cold all over, as another, worse thought occurred to her. What would it be like to be intimate with such a man, as would be expected of a wife? Karen had been properly educated and knew the facts of sexual relations, and the thought of doing such things with Mr. Wesley repelled her. 

His wife had not looked like a happy woman. Had she failed to live up to his expectations, and been written off as a bad investment? Was it likely that Karen would fare any better, in her place?

And yet, he fulfilled all of her mother’s criteria. His character was unblemished, he ran a successful business cutting and selling gemstones, he was older than Karen but not impossibly so. Karen’s objection, that he had no warmth, no heart, no compassion or kindness, she felt sure would be dismissed as fanciful.

“No,” she whispered. “Mother, no. Please, not him.”

Her mother reached out and took her hand. “I can see that this has caught you unaware,” she said. “And perhaps I broke it to you too abruptly. But you have some time to get used to the idea. The arrangements haven’t been made yet, you need not marry tomorrow. But you need a husband, and he needs a wife. This is a match that will benefit everyone, and your duty is clear.”

She released Karen’s hand, and stood up. “It’s not so terrible a fate, to be mistress of your own household,” she said with a smile, and left the room.

Karen continued to sit motionless for some time, feeling numb. _Your duty is clear._ If she refused this marriage, her mother would see it as pure selfishness, as willfully inconveniencing her entire family. But she could not marry James Wesley.

She needed to talk to her mother again, she decided. She had been taken by surprise, and wasn’t able to make a good case for herself. Penelope had said that she didn’t want to force Karen against her will, so she needed to make her mother understand that her opposition was not a matter of mere whim, easily brushed aside, but was serious and sincere. She suspected her mother would not agree with her assessment of Mr. Wesley, but she could at least try.

She got no chance that afternoon. Her father asked for her help in the workroom downstairs, where the books he sold were printed and bound together. Karen might not be his official apprentice, but her skills were still useful, and normally she was happy to help. But today, she couldn’t help feeling bitter that her parents were proposing to replace her with a wife for Kevin, a girl who would know nothing about bookbinding and would be of no use in the shop. Was her help of so little value to them? Was she now nothing but a superfluous daughter, a burden on the house?

She expected that after dinner there would be time to talk. But her mother forestalled her. As the family sat together at the table, Karen was dismayed to hear Penelope say, “Good news, Paxton. Your daughter is preparing herself for marriage.”

Her father beamed. “Well now, Karen,” he said. “Has a man been found who meets with your approval, at last?” He sounded so fond, so genuinely happy, that it just made everything worse. But she wasn't going to lie.

“No, Father,” she said quietly, forcing herself to look him in the face. “Mother has told me that I must marry, but I have not agreed.”

Paxton glanced at Penelope, then back to Karen, his approving smile gone. Karen dared a glance at her mother, and saw an expression of grim determination that made her heart sink.

“Come with me, Karen,” she ordered, her voice as forbidding as her face, and she stood up and walked out of the room. Karen followed, feeling wretched. This was the worst possible beginning to the conversation she had hoped to have. Kevin watched her leave, his expression so blank that she couldn’t guess what he might be thinking.

Once they were in her parents’ bedroom, Penelope turned to face her. “So,” she said coldly. “You have not agreed. Was it really necessary to contradict me so publicly? Must you make a liar of me to my own husband?”

“I was going to speak to you privately after dinner,” Karen answered, anxiety knotting her stomach. “You’re the one who chose to bring it up at the dinner table.”

It was the wrong thing to say, she realized too late. Penelope’s eyes narrowed, her lips pressed together in anger. “Don’t try to blame me for your own bad behavior,” she snapped. “And don’t think I’ll accept disobedience in this matter. I’ve told you that you will marry James Wesley, and so you will.”

“You’ve also told me, more than once, that you wouldn’t force me to marry against my will,” Karen said desperately. She took a deep breath, striving for calm. “This match is completely against my will. It’s not just that I don’t love him, whatever you might think. His manners might be correct, but he is entirely cold. He has no heart, no warmth of feeling at all, for me or for anyone else.”

“He has enough warmth of feeling to father a child,” Penelope answered tartly.

“That has nothing to do with his heart,” said Karen, shuddering inwardly at the thought.

“There is nothing the matter with his heart,” Penelope replied, with finality. “I admit, he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve as some men do. But I’m sure he has the same feelings as any other man, once you get to know him. As I said earlier, you expect too much.”

“Please,” she begged. “Mother, please. If you care at all for my happiness, don’t make me do this.”

“If you cared at all for your brother’s happiness, you wouldn’t be so stubborn,” she shot back. “You could have had your pick of men a few years ago. It’s no fault of mine that they’ve all married other, less fussy girls. You knew you would have to marry some day, and now that day has come. If you don’t like the choices that are left, blame yourself.”

It was hopeless. She had tried reason, she had tried begging, but her mother refused to listen.

“Now,” said Penelope, catching and holding her daughter’s eye. “Will you come back with me to the table, and tell your father you agree to the match?”

Karen stared at her, feeling trapped in some horrible dream. Everything in her cried out that what her mother was trying to do was _wrong._ The gods themselves would not sanction a forced marriage, the temple would refuse to bless such a union—but even as hope flared, it died away again. The temple couldn’t save her.

Fagan Corners was a small town, too small to have a temple of its own. The nearest one was in Maple Grove, some miles to the south, and its priests and priestesses traveled a circuit of the smaller communities throughout the year, providing blessings and performing ceremonies as needed. But now, with winter fast approaching, they would be busy elsewhere. A priestess had visited Fagan Corners just a few weeks ago, and they would not see another until spring.

It was customary for couples wishing to marry to wait until a temple official was on hand to bless the union, but it wasn’t required. If they didn’t want to wait, for whatever reason, it was perfectly acceptable to begin their married life at once, and receive the blessing later. Just as the blessing for a newborn child, or the ceremony of passing for the dead, was just as valid when administered after the fact. Life went on in between visits from the priesthood, and social custom accepted that fact.

Penelope had said that Mr. Wesley must marry as soon as possible, and no one would question it with a newborn baby to think of. She must intend for Karen to begin her life as his wife just as soon as the arrangements could be made, a few days at most. She would have no chance to plead her case to the temple until months after her so-called marriage.

And there was surely no point in appealing to Mr. Wesley himself. He needed a mother for his child, and soon. It was too much to hope that he would have any scruples about taking her unwilling.

All her anger and indignation were giving way to horror as the reality of her situation sank in. She could hardly believe her mother really meant to go through with this—to give her to a man who made her skin crawl. It made no sense. Penelope was a strict woman, and had sometimes been impatient with her willful daughter. But she had never been cruel. Bewilderment, and a growing feeling of betrayal, brought a hot prickle of tears to her eyes. She blinked them back angrily. This was wrong, and she might not be able to stop it, but she would never, never agree to it.

She looked her mother in the eye, and stiffened her spine. “No, I will not,” she answered. “I will not let my father, or you, convince yourselves that I consent to this travesty. I do _not_ consent, I do _not_ agree to this match.”

Seeing her mother’s stony expression, she felt the tears rising again. “I will not,” she said again, her voice breaking on a sob, and then she couldn’t bear to look at her any more, couldn’t bear to hear whatever Penelope might say in reply, couldn’t bear to remain in the same room with her one moment longer.

She ran out, suddenly desperate to be alone, somewhere she could cry her heart out at the injustice of it all. She ran to the stairs, and down into the workroom at the back of her father’s shop. She had always loved this room, filled with the tools and materials of the bookbinder’s trade, and books in various stages of completion. It was dark now, the candles out and the windows shuttered, but she could find her way blindfolded.

She passed the nearest table, with its boards and cloth and leather for making covers, and the awls and needles and thread for binding pages together; the next table, where freshly-printed pages were hung up to dry on lines strung above, and then put into order for binding on the table below; to the far end of the room where the printing press stood, with its boxes and boxes of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. 

She sank down to the floor in the corner behind the press, a favorite hiding place ever since she was a child. She curled herself up, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, hugging herself tightly as she cried.

She had half-expected her mother to follow her, but she did not. Karen could hear the murmur of voices overhead, and knew her parents must be talking about her and her stubbornness. Her heart ached with hurt, and dread, and her own helplessness, and she cried harder, wishing she could stay hidden here, and never have to face her mother again.

After a while she heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and tensed. But then a voice at the door said, “Karen, it’s me,” and she relaxed. It was Kevin.

He made his way across the room and sat down on the floor beside her. “Mother’s simmering like a soup kettle,” he told her, with a sigh. “She thought you might run away, but I said I knew where you’d be, and she should let you have your cry out in peace.”

Karen felt simultaneously irritated that Penelope would listen to Kevin so much more readily than to her, and grateful that he had held her back and given Karen the space she needed.

“Do you know who she wants me to marry?” she asked. She didn’t think she could stand it if Kevin was against her, too.

“I know it now,” he said, sounding troubled. “It’s no secret that she wishes you had a husband, but I had no idea she meant to hand you over to Wesley.”

“You don’t think I should marry him, do you?” she demanded. “You know what he’s like!”

“I know,” he agreed soberly. “He might be all right for a woman as cold as he is, or one who would take him for his money and not care about the rest. But he’s not the man for you, or for any woman with a heart.”

“Then you’ll take my side?” she asked, hope suddenly reviving. Maybe there was a way out, after all, if Kevin would oppose the match.

But he sighed again, and nudged his foot against hers in the darkness. “Mother doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him,” he said. “You know he doesn’t bring out that nasty-polite way of talking except where he knows he can get away with it. She’s never seen it, she honestly believes he’s a fine man. Which means she thinks you’re just being stubborn for no good reason, and she won’t stand for it. She’s got the bit between her teeth now, I don’t think even I could talk her out of it.”

“What about Father?” she asked, unwilling to give up. “If I could convince him I truly can’t bear Mr. Wesley, he wouldn’t make me go through with it, would he?”

Kevin thought about it. “I think he’s more likely to listen to Mother than to you,” he said at last. “Unless you can show him an acceptable alternative. He won’t insist on Wesley, but he wants you married as much as Mother does.”

“And you?” she asked bitterly. “Do you want me married, too, whether I want to or not? Are you so eager to get a wife in your bed that you’d throw me out?”

“Karen, that’s not fair,” he said uncomfortably. “Of course I don’t want to throw you out. But I do want to marry. Honestly, I thought that you’d stay here, and we’d all just have to make the best of cramped quarters. Other families have done it, when marriage prospects are scarce. If Mrs. Wesley hadn’t died, there really wouldn’t have been anyone that Mother would consider suitable for you, and she would have had to accept you being a spinster.”

Karen felt slightly better. It was cheering to know that her brother, at least, saw nothing wrong with her staying at home after he married. And it was true, there really were no single young men left in town that her mother would approve of as a son-in-law. Penelope would rule out not only dotards, drunkards, and men of bad character, but also men who were too poor or uneducated to meet her standards.

If there was no suitable husband to be found for Karen, her parents would have accepted necessity and kept her at home with them, however crowded it might be. In fact, thinking over the last year, remembering her mother’s grave, worried looks, she realized that Penelope must have been resigning herself to the likelihood of that very thing. But now a death in childbirth had neatly solved her problem for her.

Well, it was a solution Karen would never accept.

“I won’t marry James Wesley,” she said firmly. “Mother can’t make me. When all’s said and done, if I refuse to go, she’s not going to carry me to his house through the streets.”

“No,” Kevin agreed. “But she’s just as stubborn as you are. She can’t make you, but she’ll never let you forget it if you don’t. She can make things awfully uncomfortable for you here at home, if you insist on staying. Wesley’s a snake, I’m willing to help you get out of marrying him if I can. But I think our best chance is if we can think of an alternative, something else you can do instead.”

“How much time do we have?” she asked. “When is she planning to marry me off? She told me the arrangements hadn’t been made yet, so I had some time to get used to the idea.”

“Soon,” he said. “But I can delay her a bit, I think. I’ll go back upstairs and tell her that I’ve talked to you about it, and that you’re going to think the matter over carefully. Which is perfectly true, just not in the way she’ll think. I’ll say she should leave it for a few days, to give you a chance to come around. She’d rather have you willing than unwilling, she won’t mind a delay if she thinks it’ll get her what she wants in the end.”

“Thank you,” said Karen gratefully, reaching for his hand and squeezing it. It was a comfort to know that Kevin understood, and agreed with, her repugnance for James Wesley, and that he wanted to help her. Even if she had no idea yet what she was going to do, she felt less alone. There had to be a solution to this mess, if only she could find it.

“Do you think you can get her to not nag me about it, while I’m thinking?” she asked. “Tell her—tell her to leave it up to you to persuade me! She knows I’m angry at her right now, and you and I have always gotten along. So she should back off, and let you handle it! Phrased more diplomatically, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Good idea. And once we have a plan, I’ll help you convince Father, I promise.”

“All right.” She squeezed his hand again and released it. “Thank you, Kevin. You’re a good brother.”

“I’m the _best_ brother,” he corrected her, bumping his shoulder against hers. “You’re a pretty good sister, too.”

“I’m the _best_ sister,” she retorted, grinning and bumping him back.

He stood up and edged his way past the dark bulk of the press. “Coming?” he asked.

“In a little while,” she answered. “I’d like a little more time to myself before I see Mother again.”

“All right. I’ll go smooth her down for you.”

* * *

The next day, Karen did her best to act like a subdued young woman who was trying to reconcile herself to necessity. She was quiet and biddable, going about her daily tasks with no complaint. She didn’t try to hide her unhappiness, but a cheerful mood wouldn’t have been believable anyway after last night’s scene. her mother watched her closely whenever they were in the same room, but Karen ignored her scrutiny.

Underneath her docile exterior, she was thinking desperately. What real options did she have?

Marry someone else? She might almost have considered it, but she already knew there was no one else her parents would approve, even if she could find a man that she could bear, who would be willing to take her at such short notice.

Marry Mr. Wesley, and endure it until the next visit from the temple, when she could plead her case? Not if she could help it. She shuddered at the thought of living with him as his wife, even for just a few months. And anyway, once the temple granted her a annulment and she was free, she would be right back where she was now, in need of some sort of plan for her life. A formal Annulment by Reason of Coercion would shame her parents, which they might deserve, but which would definitely make it difficult for her to come back home and live with them again.

Clearly, marriage was out of the question.

Her parents wanted her out of the house. Was there some other way she could achieve that? Plenty of women in the town owned their own homes and businesses. But they still lived with family, either their parents or a spouse. Even Claire the midwife, one of the most respected women in town, lived with her widowed mother.

Women simply didn’t live alone. Trying to do so, assuming she could even find a suitable place, would cause a scandal—and likely draw attention from those men of bad character that she didn’t want to marry. Too risky.

What if she decided to train as a priestess? That was highly respectable, she could live in the temple, and it wouldn’t matter if she ever married or not. She would have to leave Fagan Corners, but that was beginning to look like a better option than staying here. The trouble was, she didn’t actually have any interest in being a priestess. It would be binding herself to a path for which she had no true vocation, and offering the gods false service into the bargain. Not a good idea.

But perhaps the temple could still serve her needs. If she was willing to leave Fagan Corners, then she wouldn’t need to wait for the spring visitation to get out of this hateful marriage. Why not simply leave, go to Maple Grove, and seek sanctuary in the temple there? She was certain they would listen to her, and issue the necessary injunction. An Injunction Against Marriage would embarrass her parents, but it would be far less serious than the shame attached to an Annulment by Reason of Coercion.

So far, it was the best idea she had come up with. But it was sure to cause a breach between herself and her parents, especially since she was going to have to do it behind their backs. They would never allow her to go openly to Maple Grove for such a purpose, so she would have to do it secretly, in effect running away from home.

If only Fagan Corners had its own temple! How much simpler it would be, if she could go and talk to a priest as easily as she might visit the local butcher shop. The priest could give the injunction to her parents and Mr. Wesley privately, and no one else would ever have to know. But if she must run away to gain her point, there would be no way to keep the matter private.

Was she willing to cause such a rupture in her family? Would her parents forgive her, if she did?

By evening, she hadn’t thought of any other ideas. She was eager to talk to Kevin, hoping that he had thought of something that she hadn’t. But after dinner, when they finally got a chance to talk privately, he admitted a little sheepishly that he hadn’t thought of any ideas at all.

“You know I was setting type today,” he said, “and I can’t go letting my mind wander while I do that. Think of all the time and work wasted, if I made a mistake and had to do an entire page over!”

That was true, she knew. Setting type accurately required concentration. But she also knew that Kevin didn’t like to think about unpleasant things if he could avoid it. His heart was in the right place, but she was beginning to think that he might not be much help to her after all in coming up with a plan.

Still, he was more than willing to hear her ideas, and give his opinions. And he promised again to support her in her decision, and that was something.

The next day was much the same. No new ideas occurred to her, and she began to think seriously about running away to seek sanctuary. She thought she could bear a breach with her parents better than she could bear marrying James Wesley. And after all, she wouldn’t even be considering such a thing if her parents had only been willing to listen to her. If a breach was the price of gaining her freedom, Penelope had driven her to it. Karen would have been glad to choose less drastic measures, if any had been available to her.

By the third day, he mother had stopped watching her so closely, reassured by her subdued manner and docile behavior. Penelope did not speak to her about the marriage, to Karen’s relief. But she overheard enough bits of conversation between her parents to know that they considered the matter settled, and had no doubt that Karen would soon accept it.

Instead, Karen began stealthily gathering up a supply of food, and trying to figure out how long it would take to reach her destination on foot. She had decided not to go to Maple Grove after all—it was not the only city in the area, it was just the easiest to get to. Which meant it was the first place she would be looked for, when her parents discovered her missing. The Pages did not own a horse, but Constable Mahoney did, and if she was pursued on horseback she would be stopped long before she could reach Maple Grove.

But the city of Richfield also had a temple, and was in the opposite direction, on the other side of the mountain that loomed over Fagan Corners to the north. 

The mountain was wild land, covered in thick forest. To reach the other side, she would need to either make the lengthy journey around its broad base, or take the shorter but more difficult route up and over the top. There was a good road leading up to the pass and down the other side, but it would be an arduous climb, through forest inhabited by wild animals.

But it was the fastest way to reach Richfield, and it was the last route anyone would expect her to take. By the time anyone thought of looking for her in that direction, she would be safely in the Richfield temple. She hoped.

Karen had heard rumors for most of her life that a kodor lived on the mountain, fierce and dangerous and ready to kill any human that dared to enter his territory. But she had never been sure if the tales were true, or if they were just stories to frighten children. The road was there to be used, after all, and people did cross over the mountain now and then—not often, but often enough to show that it could be done.

And anyway, the kodor, if it _had_ existed, was dead now. Or at least, that was the claim of a group of strangers who had ridden down the mountain and into town one dark night a few years ago. They had gone to the tavern and gotten roaring drunk, boasting that they had killed the beast. Not everyone believed them, but the news was all over town by morning.

Whether it was true or not, Karen decided she was willing to brave the mountain road. She was less concerned with rumors than she was with the weather. Winter was closing in, and to be caught in the open in a snowstorm would be as dangerous as any attack by wild creatures. And even if the snow held off, the cold itself was a danger. She planned to wear extra layers of clothing, and bring a tinder box so she could stop and build a fire if necessary. But even so, the longer she delayed, the worse that danger would grow.

She needed to go at once, while the weather remained relatively mild, and take the fastest route possible so she could be safely arrived by the time the inevitable winter storms began.

She wondered if she should tell Kevin her new plan. Surely the less he knew, the better, once she was discovered missing. But that evening after dinner, when they took a candle down to the workshop to talk in private, he surprised her.

“You’re coming with me?” she asked in amazement.

“Yes. I don’t mean permanently, just listen. I agree you’ve got to go, it’s the best option you have. But you know it’s dangerous for you to go alone. And I promised I would help you. I’ll come with you, and see you safely into sanctuary in the temple, and then I’ll come back. And I can tell Mother and Father that you’re safe, so they won’t worry.”

Karen stared at him. “Just come back here, and admit that you helped me run away? Kevin, they’ll be furious.”

He shrugged. “They’ll forgive me.”

She knew he was right. The golden boy, the favorite child, of course they would forgive him. She, on the other hand….

She sighed. “They won’t forgive me as easily as they will you,” she said. “I still don’t know what I’m going to do afterward, once I’ve got the injunction.”

“I’ll take your side, and try to talk them around. One problem at a time, all right? First, get yourself free of Wesley. Who knows? Maybe you’ll meet some dashing young man in Maple Grove and all your troubles will be over.” He grinned, and she couldn’t help smiling back at his optimism.

“Well then,” she said. “If you’re coming with me, then I’d better tell you that I’m not going to Maple Grove. I’m going over the mountain, to Richfield. They won’t expect that, and I’ll have time to get there before they come looking for me.”

Kevin’s eyes widened for a moment, then he nodded. “Good idea. And all the more reason for me to come with you. Those woods aren’t safe.”

“Afraid of the kodor?”

He snorted. “The kodor’s dead, unless those men who claimed they killed it were even drunker than they seemed. You know that’s not the only danger.”

“No, I know. I was willing to risk it alone…but I’m glad I don’t have to. Thank you, Kevin.” She would be truly glad to have his company, as well as the added safety he could offer. 

She felt that she was standing on a precipice of change, and no matter what happened, things would never be the same after this. Even in the best-case scenario, if both of them were forgiven and welcomed back home, Kevin would marry, and his relationship with his sister would inevitably grow more distant. 

And if she were not forgiven…well. One problem at a time. However things fell out, she was glad she would have her brother with her on this journey.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “If there are two of us, I’ll need to pack more food—“

“No, you won’t. I packed my own. And my best knife, and a tinder box, and some money in case I need to buy anything for my trip back. You’re not the only one who can plan, you know.”

She smiled. “All right, good. We should go soon, so we can get there _and_ you can get back, before the weather turns.”

He nodded. “If you’ve packed everything you need, why not tonight? It should be clear, and the moon is nearly full. If we wait until everyone in town is asleep, no one will see us go.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, let’s go tonight.” And then she felt, unexpectedly, a wave of remorse. She loved her parents, and she was about to abandon them without a word, and without knowing if they would take her back after it was all over. She had spent the last three days focused on her anger and hurt, and on her planning. But now that she was finally on the point of action, she couldn’t help feeling regret for what she was about to lose, and for the pain she was about to cause.

It wasn’t enough to shake her resolve, though, as she and Kevin made their plans. The nights were long at this time of year, and they planned to walk for as long as they could, to get as far from Fagan Corners as possible before stopping to rest. With any luck, they could reach Richfield in a few days. As soon as their parents were asleep tonight, they would slip out of the house and be on their way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains violence, some of it fatal. See end notes for details.

After his father’s death, Matthew continued to live in the house on the mountain. The fascination he had once felt for humans had turned to bitterness, and he wished he were farther away from the towns below. But humans lived everywhere, it seemed. If an area was habitable at all, they would inhabit it. There was no getting away from them.

And this house had been his home for his entire life, and it was all he had left of his parents. No, he was not going to leave. He could ignore the humans, as his father had done, and live his solitary life up here, where few of them ever came.

He still visited human towns to buy supplies, but he was grim and taciturn now, and spoke to the people he encountered as little as possible. And he still hunted the dangerous humans who preyed on others, but that, too, was different than it used to be.

Immediately after his father’s death, he had been filled with anger and hate against all humans, and saw no reason why he should protect those who were too weak to protect themselves. His heart never grew so black that he would harm the weak himself, but he didn’t want to help them, either.

When the violence within him became hard to bear, urging him to fight, he tried to burn off some of his pent-up aggression by running. In the dead of night he would come down from the mountain and run across country, faster than a galloping horse, until he was exhausted and the violence had calmed and drained away.

But within a few months, his innate sense of justice reasserted itself. When he heard the frightened cry of a child on one of his midnight runs, he turned aside to follow the sound almost without thinking. Surely, a child deserved to be protected.

He found a man and a young boy, presumably father and son, camped a short distance from the road. Their small fire would keep away any wild animals, but it had drawn the attention of something more dangerous.

Their attacker had probably intended to rob them as they slept, but they had woken—and now, the knife in his hand as he pinned the father to the ground made it clear that he was willing to kill to get what he wanted.

Matthew grabbed the thief from behind and hauled him up and back, stunning him with a powerful blow to the head. Then he picked the man up and ran with him, far enough away that the father and son would be in no danger from the fight he was eagerly anticipating. Far enough away that the child wouldn’t have to see what happened next.

Later, when he returned home, he felt a sense of peace that he had never achieved by running alone. He had discovered that there were still some humans that he wanted to protect, after all; and in the heat of combat, he had realized that the rage he felt against murderers was motive enough to fight them, regardless of how he felt about their victims. He still disliked most of humanity, but fighting the worst of them felt right. His inner violence was satisfied, and justice was served.

But most of his time was spent close to home. He tended his garden, and gathered wood in the forest, and hunted the animals that lived there for food. His speed and enhanced senses made him more than a match for small game, although he might hesitate to take on a stag all by himself.

His house was a one-room cabin, with a storage shed built onto one side. It was simply furnished, with a bed, a table and chair, a few shelves on the walls and several storage chests in the corners holding all his belongings. The fireplace served for both heat and cooking.

There had used to be two beds, and two chairs—three, when his mother was still alive. But furniture that no one would ever use was a waste of space, as well as a constant reminder that he was now alone. Of the two beds, he decided to keep his father’s, and took apart the smaller one that had been his own, putting away the extra blankets in the chest that held his supplies of linen and wool for making clothing.

The days seemed long without his father there. Even with all the work he needed to do to keep himself supplied with food and fire, time sometimes hung heavy on his hands. He could read his mother’s books, his sensitive fingers feeling the subtle indentations left in the paper by the printing press. And he could carve wood, and bone, and deer antler when he could find it.

Sometimes he made practical things, like spoons, or a comb for his hair when his old one broke. Sometimes he attempted to carve birds, or flowers, or decorative patterns that served no purpose but to pass the time. He usually ended up dissatisfied with these pieces, and threw them in the fire.

It never occurred to him that his dissatisfaction, and general state of unhappiness, was simply loneliness. He knew that he missed his father, of course. The sharp pain of loss had dulled over time to a bearable ache, but it was still there, like a hole inside him. But it never entered his head that he might want any other companionship.

Kodors were solitary, and in his anger against humanity he preferred not to think of himself as half-human. He never stopped loving his human mother, but he was a kodor, and kodors lived alone and kept to themselves. He knew that he was bitter and gloomy, and took no joy in anything, unless you counted the fierce pleasure he took in a good fight. But he didn’t see what he could do about it, and supposed he would just have to get used to it.

And so months became seasons, and seasons became years.

And then, one night in early winter, long after midnight, he was awakened by a woman’s scream. It cut through the stillness of the forest like a knife, shrill and terrified. He was out of bed, pulling on trousers and boots, and out the door in moments.

He ran toward the road, listening hard, and soon heard the sounds of a struggle, the rapid heartbeats of several humans, accompanied by heavy breathing and men cursing.

He knew it was dangerous for him to be seen so close to his home, but he couldn’t stand by and do nothing. He could hear the woman now as he drew closer, frightened, sobbing breaths punctuated by a cry of pain. Were all the men against her, or did she have any allies in this fight? He burst out of the trees a short distance away, and took in the scene before him.

A young man lay with his throat cut, his heart already slowing to a stop as his life spilled out onto the ground. A man crouched over him, cutting the pouch from his belt, while three others grappled with a struggling woman.

She screamed again as Matthew rushed toward them, and he heard fury in the sound as well as fear. She had a knife, and was using it to good effect, but they had knives of their own, and they outnumbered her. Surely they could have killed her already, as easily as they had killed her companion—unless they meant to take her alive. Bile rose in his throat at the thought of a lone woman in the hands of four thieving murderers.

He held no weapons, but his horns had grown to their full extent as he ran, and now he lowered his head like a bull and charged at the struggling group. His horns sank deep into a broad back, and Matthew wrapped his arms around the man’s chest and dragged him backward.

His father could have tossed the man off his horns like a rag doll, but Matthew knew he might well break his own neck if he tried it. So he hauled the man out of the fight, then pushed him off his horns and let him crumple to the ground.

The woman continued to fight fiercely against her remaining assailants, her heart pounding as rapidly as a rabbit’s, panic giving her strength. But even as Mathew turned back toward them, one man lashed out at her, his knife catching her below the ribs and scoring a long gash across her abdomen as she spun away from him with a shocked cry of pain.

The other man caught her from behind and wrapped an arm around her throat, squeezing tight, choking the air out of her. Matthew wasn’t sure if they even realized he was there yet, everything was happening so quickly.

But the fourth man, busy robbing the dead body, had seen. “Kodor!” he shouted hoarsely. “Demon!” His heart stuttered, and Matthew could smell the fear rolling off him in a wave as he leapt to his feet and ran away down the road.

He wanted to chase after the man and silence him, but if he did, he would be leaving the injured woman at the mercy of the two remaining bandits. With a growl of anger and frustration, he turned back toward them, spurred on by the small, desperate choking sounds she made as her struggles against the man who held her grew weaker.

The other man turned to face him with a curse, and lunged at him. Matthew dodged away from the knife and caught the man by the wrist, digging in his fingers until the bandit’s fingers opened, the knife falling to the ground. Matthew kicked, and heard ribs crack as the man doubled over.

But he drew a second knife from his boot and slashed at Matthew’s leg, a vicious cut that would have severed tendons if Matthew hadn’t had a kodor’s lightning-fast reflexes. He released his hold and jumped back, scooping up the fallen knife before the bandit could.

Behind them, the woman finally lost consciousness and slumped to the ground, and her captor stepped away from her and charged at Matthew from behind. He spun to meet this fresh onslaught, while his first opponent attacked from the side. 

It was two against one, but Matthew was faster, and could perceive what was happening behind him as easily as in front. He struck like a snake, with his knife and his horns and his feet, kicking and slashing, and soon it was over.

Once the bandits lay dead, he turned his attention to the unconscious woman. The air was thick with the smells of blood and death, making it harder for him to judge how badly injured she might be. He realized that he was going to have to bring her back to his house, regardless, for even if her wounds were only slight, he couldn’t just leave her here all alone. Wolves would be drawn to the smell of fresh blood, and she was defenseless. But could she be moved without hurting her further?

He knelt down beside her, and examined her. There were cuts on her forearms, no doubt from raising them to protect her face. They were shallow, and should heal quickly. The slice across her middle was more worrying. He bent over her until his nose was nearly touching her, his nostrils flaring. He smelled blood, but nothing worse—no trace of the sour, rotten odors that would mean her stomach or intestines had been breached. Good.

He touched her, very carefully, trying to get an idea of the extent of the cut, without touching the wound itself. It wasn’t too deep, but it was long, and bleeding freely. He needed to bind it up before he could move her.

There was plenty of linen available, as they were all wearing it. But none of it was clean, what with blood, and sweat, and dirt. He checked the dead man, picked clean of valuables by the escaped bandit, but his clothing, too, was fouled with blood.

In the end, the cleanest linen available was the woman’s own shifts, of which she was wearing several. He tore strips from one layer of her skirts, folded one length into a pad to cover the wound, then wrapped the rest around her to hold the makeshift dressing in place.

As he worked, he began to wonder for the first time who this woman was, and what she and her companion were doing out here in the middle of nowhere. They both wore good-quality clothing, as far as he could judge by touch. The fabric was finely woven, their cloaks thick and warm, and both the woman’s dress and the man’s overshirt had narrow bands of embroidery edging the neck and sleeves.

But if they had wealth enough to afford such clothes, why were they traveling alone, on foot, in the middle of the night? They couldn’t be runaway servants, unless they had stolen their masters’ clothing before running. But the circumstances did suggest running away. Were they lovers, forbidden to be together? Or had they committed some crime, and were fleeing the sheriff’s justice?

Well, no matter. He had made up his mind to help this woman, from the moment he had first heard her scream. If she did turn out to be a criminal, he could handle her. Right now, he needed to get her indoors, where he could properly tend to her injuries. The past, whatever it might be, could wait. He wrapped her cloak securely around her to keep her warm, lifted her gently in his arms, and turned toward home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karen and her brother are violently attacked in the woods. Kevin is killed, and Karen is injured, but she is saved by Matthew, who fights and kills her attackers. Kevin's murder is not actually depicted; the POV is Matthew's, and by the time he arrives Kevin is on the point of death from blood loss.


	4. Chapter 4

Karen woke slowly, feeling strangely weak. Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy, but she managed to raise them, seeing an unfamiliar room lit only by the fire burning in the fireplace. Nearby, a man sat at a table, straining the contents of a small pot into a cup.

She frowned, and drew breath to speak—but gasped instead, pain shooting through her. A line of fire burned across her belly, and when she reached down to touch, her hand encountered bandages. She nearly cried out from the pain, but managed to bite it back.

The man turned toward her at her gasp, his eyes glowing bronze—she blinked and looked again, and no, his eyes were brown. What was wrong with her?

He picked up the cup and came to the bedside.

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You’re injured. Here, drink this.” His manner was abrupt, his voice gruff, but his hands were gentle as he slipped one hand behind her head and held the cup to her lips with the other.

The drink had an herbal, medicinal flavor, and she found that reassuring. She knew some of the common healing herbs, and it seemed that this man did, too. As she sipped, she tried to think. Where was she, and what had happened to her? Something teased her memory. She couldn’t catch it, but she knew it was important…she tried to disregard the stabbing pain, and focus her sluggish thoughts.

By the time she had drained the cup, she had it. “Kevin!” she exclaimed, or tried to, but her voice was as weak as the rest of her. “Where is my brother?” she asked the man urgently.

He would not meet her eyes. “Your brother?” he replied. “Is that who he was?”

A cold hand gripped her heart. “Was?” she repeated. She tried again to think, to remember. She and Kevin were crossing the mountain, to get to Richfield. And then….

“No,” she whispered, tears coming to her eyes. “They cut his throat.” She turned to the man in mute appeal, but he bowed his head.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

A sob broke from her. “They cut his throat!” she repeated, an anguished wail. She tried to turn over in the bed, to bury her face in the pillow, but pain tore through her, and the man’s hands gripped her shoulders, holding her down.

“Keep still, or you’ll tear yourself open,” he said sharply.

At his angry tone, the last shred of her self-control broke, and she dissolved into tears. She didn’t try to move again, but her body shook with sobs she couldn’t control. She covered her face with her hands, trying to shut out the room, the man, but most of all the cold, hard fact that her brother was dead, and it was her fault.

Matthew felt the woman go limp, and took his hands from her shoulders. He knew her sobs must be jarring her wound, but he also knew she was too weak to be able to stop herself. He withdrew from the bed, to give her what privacy he could, and sat quietly at the table, thinking.

She was in no state to travel, nor would be for some time. He had cleaned her injuries carefully, and bandaged them with fresh linen from his own supplies, coated with the salve he made every year to treat his own injuries. As he had thought, her wounds weren’t life-threatening, but the one across her midriff was serious enough to keep her in bed until it healed, and she was weakened by blood loss besides. Like it or not, he was going to have to keep a human in his home until she was well again. He had no idea how long humans took to heal, but even he would need a few days to recover from a gash like that, For her, it was certain to be longer.

 _Weak,_ the bitter part of his mind said contemptuously. _Soft. Useless._

But he remembered how she had fought against her assailants, desperate and determined. He remembered how she had screamed defiance at them, as frightened as she was. She might be a weak human, but she was brave.

And even if she were every bit as soft and useless as his bitterness wanted to think her, she still didn’t deserve what those bandits would have done to her. His first impulse had been to protect her, and although he hadn’t anticipated having to bring her into his home and take care of her, he knew it was the right thing to do. He would continue to keep her safe, for as long as necessary.

As he listened to her quiet weeping, the last of his bitterness was driven out by compassion. She had just lost her brother, and clearly she grieved the loss deeply. And she was in a strange place, with a strange man, and helpless. She might well be afraid—it would be remarkable, in fact, if she were not. He didn’t want her to fear him.

He had grieved his father’s death all alone, with no one to comfort him. But she was not alone, even if her only companion was a gruff, awkward stranger. He returned quietly to her bedside, uncertain what he could do to ease her pain, but sure that he wanted to at least try.

He didn’t want to loom over her, so he knelt on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said again, making his voice as gentle as he could. “I never had any siblings, but my father was killed, years ago. It’s a terrible thing, and terribly hard to accept, I know.”

He knew he was laying himself open to questions, questions he didn’t want to answer until he had figured out how he was going to explain who he was, and what she was doing in his house, without revealing his true nature and frightening her even more. But he didn’t know how else to express his sympathy. He remembered all too well the shock of loss, the disbelief, and then the terrible, heart-breaking grief, and he wanted her to know that he understood.

She turned her head toward him, and lowered her hands from her face. “It’s my fault,” she whispered, her voice breaking on a sob. “I was the one who decided to run away, the only reason he came along with me was to keep me safe. If it weren’t for my willfulness—” She broke off, a fresh spate of tears shaking her. She turned her head away, one hand pressed to her mouth.

Matthew had no idea what to say to that. He had no idea how to talk to humans at all, really, outside of superficial exchanges over a merchant’s counter. 

After a moment’s hesitation he took her hand, half-expecting her to pull away. But her fingers curled around his, holding him as tightly as her weakened state would allow. It seemed she was willing to take whatever comfort she could get.

Moved by the memory of his mother, he reached out with his other hand to tuck the blankets around her more securely, and brushed his hand over her hair very gently. He didn’t speak again, but stayed by the bed, holding her hand in silent sympathy, until she had cried herself back to sleep. Then he tucked her hand under the covers, and stood up.

He went back to the table, and considered his pot of healing salve. It was more than half empty. He couldn’t make more at this time of year, when there were no fresh herbs available. He had plenty of dried herbs, for cooking and for steeping into drinks, but the salve required fresh. But what was left in the pot should be enough to heal this woman.

And now there was another matter he needed to take care of, now that he had done everything he could for his guest. There were dead bodies lying in the road outside, too near his home for comfort. Who knew how soon other humans might travel this way, and find them? The woman had run away—would anyone be looking for her? Those bodies needed to be moved, at once. The woman was unlikely to wake for hours, and she was safe here in his house. He could leave her alone for a while.

He went outside, listening carefully to the night as he made his way through the trees. There were wolves prowling near the road, as he had predicted, but he could drive them away if he had to. He had no objection to them scavenging the dead, but he wanted them to do it far from the road, where the remains they left behind would never be found. He could hear other, smaller nocturnal animals going about their business in the undergrowth, but no sign of any more humans. Good.

When he reached the road, there were two wolves standing over the bodies and sniffing them. Fortunately, they had a healthy respect for kodors, and withdrew into the trees at his approach.

Before he moved them, he checked the bodies for valuables. Each bandit wore a pouch at his belt, holding what money they had, which Matthew took. And there on the ground, where the woman had fallen, was a satchel that smelled like her. It was damaged, the animals of the forest eager to get at whatever food it had held, but he could bring her what was left of her belongings.

Moving the bloody bodies was unpleasant, but he used his speed to good effect. He ran a good distance down the road before veering off into the trees, leaving each bandit in a different place, all of them deep in the forest and far from his house.

When he came to the last body, he paused. This was the woman’s brother, and he would have liked to bring her something of his. But the bandit who had escaped had taken everything but his blood-soaked clothes.

Still, there was one thing he could do, that he hoped would bring her comfort. Instead of dropping the body unceremoniously in the woods for carrion-eaters to find, he carried it back to the house, to the spot where his parents were buried. The season was turning, but the ground wasn’t frozen yet.

As he dug the grave, one ear on the woman inside in case she woke, a part of him wondered why he was going to so much effort for this human he didn’t even know. But when he thought of the woman, and her hopeless, wracking tears, he knew. And besides, the man must have been both brave and loyal, to undertake this journey just to protect his sister. He didn’t deserve his untimely death. Matthew had come too late to save him, but he could at least give him a proper burial.

When he had finished, he went and washed off the blood in the icy water of the nearest stream, and made his shivering way back to the house.

The woman was still deeply asleep. Matthew dried himself and dressed in dry clothes, then got out his spare blankets and lay down on the floor before the fire. He still had no idea how he was going to explain himself to his guest, and as he drifted off to sleep, he wondered what he was going to say to her when she woke.

* * * * *

The next morning, a man sat in the tavern in Fagan Corners, eating a hasty breakfast. He had come into town on the mountain road, pale and haggard, and when he reached the tavern he had ordered a large, stiff drink. He drank it off with a speed that raised a few eyebrows, this early in the day, and was now eating his bread and cheese as if it were the first food he’d seen in days—or the last he ever expected to.

He glanced around the room when he was finished, and noticed the covert looks being directed at him by the tavern’s other patrons.

“That mountain’s a death-trap,” he said loudly, to the room at large. “There’s a kodor up there!”

Conversation at the other tables stopped. After a moment, the stonemason’s apprentice answered him.

“Aye, there used to be. But it was hunted down and killed, a couple of years ago. There’s no kodor there now.”

“There is,” the stranger insisted. “I saw it with my own eyes, last night. I was coming over the pass with a few mates, and the demon attacked us!”

A few skeptical looks were exchanged.

“I saw it, I tell you! Like a man, but with horns on its head as large as life, and eyes blazing like the pits of hell. It charged at us, and gored one of my mates clean through. I didn’t wait to see more, I ran for my life!”

The stonemason’s apprentice curled his lip. The stranger flushed. “Think me a coward if you like,” he said. “But at least I’m still alive. I’d like to see you stand up to a kodor, you young pup. You’d be crying for your mother if you’d seen it for yourself.”

He stood up, tossed some coins on the table, and hoisted a bulky satchel onto his shoulder. “Believe me, or don’t. I’m off. If either of my other mates make it down alive, you can tell them I’ve gone on. They’ll know where to meet me.” He strode out the door.

“Drunk,” said the stonemason’s apprentice, shaking his head. “He’s seeing things. Could be a bear attacked them, maybe. But not a kodor.”

A few other patrons nodded and muttered in agreement. But in the corner by the fire, one man stared after the stranger thoughtfully, and said nothing.


	5. Chapter 5

When Matthew woke in the morning, he still didn’t know how was going to explain himself to the woman—but she was in no condition to be asking questions. She was still unconscious, but her heart was beating rapidly, and heat was radiating from her skin.

 _Wound fever,_ Matthew thought, with a pang of apprehension. Fevers frightened him. It was a fever that had killed his mother, and taken his sight. He had never caught another one, and he knew that even to humans, they weren’t always fatal. But he still couldn’t help the fear that gripped him when he felt how hot she was.

 _You know what to do,_ he reminded himself, and consulted his father’s apothecary book. Willow bark, that was what he needed to treat a fever.

He didn’t want to leave the woman alone in this state, but he had no willow bark in the house, and his water bucket was nearly empty. He checked her wounds before he left, carefully cleaning her skin with the last of the water and applying fresh bandages coated with salve. She moved restlessly under his touch, but didn’t wake. 

He felt her burning forehead, and rested his hand on her hair for a moment. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised.

When he returned, with a supply of willow bark and a fresh bucket of water from the stream, the woman was twitching beneath her blankets and muttering incoherently. He dipped a cloth into the cold water and bathed her face and hands, and set more water over the fire to boil.

Once his infusion of willow bark was ready, he brought a cupful to the bed, and a spoon. He lifter her head with one hand, and carefully tipped a spoonful of the liquid into her mouth. She turned her face away from the bitter taste, and he said softly, “Drink it. You’re ill, and this will help you get better.”

He tried again, and whether his words had reached her fevered mind, or whether she was simply thirsty enough to disregard the taste, this time she swallowed it down. Slowly, spoonful by spoonful, he got the whole dose into her.

And then, all he could do was keep her as comfortable as he could, and hope that her body was strong enough to prevail.

For the next several days he tended her carefully, while she lay in a stupor and did not wake. He fed her willow-bark tea, and changed the dressings on her wounds, and bathed her hot face and hands, and waited to see if she was going to live. He only left the house to bring in firewood, or to fetch water from the stream, or to set snares for game in the woods since he couldn’t take the time right now to hunt.

At times she seemed half-conscious, turning her head as if looking around her and muttering to herself. But the few words he could distinguish made it clear that she was lost in her own mind, not seeing the room she lay in.

Sometimes she would call out for her brother, sounding frightened. Was she remembering the attack by the bandits? He began to talk to her when she was restless, hoping his words might reach her. He could give her no comfort where her brother was concerned, but there was one reassurance he could offer.

“You’re safe,” he told her. “No one will hurt you in my house. I’ll keep you safe.”

 _If this fever doesn’t kill you,_ he added silently. He was doing everything he could to help her, but fighting sickness was different from fighting armed men. Brawling with thieves and cutthroats was often messy, but it was quick and decisive. Fighting a fever was a much slower business, filled with waiting and uncertainty.

While he waited, he cleaned and mended her clothing, hoping that she would survive to need it. Her dress, and all of the shifts under it, had been cut by the bandit’s knife and stained with her blood. He had removed them when he first brought her here, and dressed her in one of his shirts over her own underclothes, which had luckily escaped damage—a pair of close-fitting breeches that covered her legs to the knee. He wished flesh were as easy to mend as cloth, as he carefully stitched up the tears.

When her fever finally broke, in a drenching sweat that soaked the bedsheets, he breathed a sigh of relief. The woman would live. This time, at least, the fever was cheated of its victim.

* * *

Karen’s mind wandered in a fog of heat and pain. Fragmented memories of blood and violence chased each other through her dreams. She saw her brother, surrounded by bandits; and a man with impossible horns on his head, his eyes blazing with an unearthly light, his skin a strange color in the moonlight. _The kodor of the mountain,_ she thought. But no, the kodor was dead. Was she dead, too?

But through her fear and confusion, there was a quiet voice telling her she was safe, the touch of gentle hands on her burning skin, bitter liquid for her parched throat and a cool cloth on her forehead.

When her mind finally cleared, she awoke into a fire-lit room that seemed familiar. Her skin felt unpleasantly clammy, and a dull pain throbbed across her midriff. She felt far too tired to try to move, but she let her eyes travel around the room, trying to make sense of what she saw. Something didn’t seem right.

There was a man in the room, but that wasn’t it. He seemed familiar, too, and she knew somehow that he belonged here. He was stripping the sheets off a bed, his back to her. She felt certain that she had been in the bed before, but now she was…below?

She looked the other way, toward the fire, and noticed that the fireplace was level with her head. She frowned, trying to work it out, her brain as tired as the rest of her, and finally realized she was lying on the floor, cushioned by a pile of blankets, with more blankets covering her.

Once that fact clicked into place, others followed. She remembered the attack in the woods, and her brother’s death. And she remembered waking once before in this place, with this man. She was injured, he had told her. That would explain the pain.

She looked back at him and tried to speak, but all that emerged was a dry little rasp. Still, faint as it was, he turned toward her immediately.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Good.” He set down his armful of linen, picked up a cup from the table, and came to crouch down beside her. He raised her head up and held the cup to her lips, and she drank eagerly. Plain water, not the bitter drink she half-remembered.

“You sweat out a great deal of water when your fever broke,” he told her. “That’s why you’re so thirsty.” When she had emptied the cup, he laid her head back down.

“I feel damp,” she mumbled.

“Yes,” he agreed, standing up and going to a trunk in the corner of the room. “I moved you from the bed so I could change the sheets for clean, dry ones.” He took a pile of folded linen out of the trunk, and began putting the fresh sheets on the bed. Not looking at her, he went on a little stiffly: “I should change your shirt, as well, or you might take a chill.”

Shirt? Karen shifted slightly in her nest of blankets, and reached down to examine the clothing she was wearing. She touched her own pantalettes, but above them was, not her shift, but a linen shirt. She felt a faint blush rise in her cheeks, despite her exhaustion, at the implication.

To be sure, she asked, “Is there anyone else here but us?”

“No,” he answered in the same stiff tone. “I live alone.”

He had undressed her, then. He continued to make the bed, still not looking at her, tension in the line of his shoulders, and it occurred to her that perhaps he was just as embarrassed as she was.

“I’ve cleaned the blood from your clothes, and mended the tears,” he said uncomfortably. “I’d offer you your own shift, but it’s easier to change your bandages if you’re wearing something shorter.” 

Perhaps he was expecting her to be angry. But she wasn’t. Embarrassed, yes, but he had only done what was necessary to care for her. She tried to will away her pointless blush. “A dry shirt will be very welcome,” she said softly, trying not to sound as awkward as she felt. “Thank you.”

The tense line of his shoulders relaxed. He came to crouch beside her again, and as the flickering firelight played over his features, she suddenly remembered the kodor, a patch of moonlight between the trees lighting up his face. _The same face._

“You were there,” she blurted out, without stopping to consider the sheer impossibility of what she was saying. “I saw you, you fought the bandits, it was you!”

And his eyes suddenly glowed bronze, as a look of utter consternation crossed his face.

“Your eyes,” she breathed, amazed, but sure now that she was right. He turned his head away sharply and closed his eyes.

The kodor of the mountain, alive and well. She was afraid for an instant—she had been told all her life that kodors were vicious beasts, who would kill anyone who crossed their path. But here she was, not only still alive, but being cared for. She remembered his hand holding hers, and the voice from her fever telling her that he would keep her safe.

“You fought the bandits,” she repeated. “You saved me.”

He turned back toward her, his eyes open again but cast down.

“You saw me,” he said, his voice low and tense. “You know what I am. Aren’t you afraid?”

“Should I be?” she asked.

“Humans always fear kodors,” he answered bitterly.

She remembered the glimpse of him she had had in the moonlight, before she blacked out—eyes blazing, teeth bared in a snarl, his horns dark with the blood of the man he had just gored. In that guise, yes, surely he would frighten anyone. He looked like a demon from some pit of nightmare.

“I was afraid,” she admitted. The effort of talking tired her, but this was important. “When I saw you, in the road, I was terrified. But it was those men, those _humans,_ that I feared the most. I barely even had time to be afraid of you. I know well enough what they would have done to me, if you hadn’t stopped them.”

“And aren’t you afraid I’ll do the same, now that I’ve got you here in my home?” he asked harshly.

 _Should I be?_ she wondered again, but silently this time. She had never doubted his intentions, while she believed he was human. Did knowing he was a kodor really change anything? Her own experience was flatly contradicting kodors’ evil reputation. As forbidding as he looked right now, she couldn’t believe he would hurt her.

“You haven’t so far,” she answered. “I doubt those bandits would have bothered to heal me, before they…” she gulped, unable to say the words. 

She was uncomfortably aware that he had, in fact, undressed her while she was unconscious. But surely she would know if he had raped her. Even if she had managed to remain unconscious through the act, she would have felt the pain of it when she woke. _He didn’t. He wouldn’t._

“You took me in, and took care of me,” she said. “And it seems you’ve nursed me through a fever, as well. That’s a lot of effort to go to, if you’re just going to hurt me later.” She thought of the quiet voice that had calmed her fevered distress. “You told me I was safe. I didn’t dream that, did I? You said no one would harm me in your house.”

“You didn’t dream it,” he said quietly.

“You comforted me when I cried for my brother,” she went on. Tears welled up in her eyes as she remembered. She had no strength to stop them. “You are kind,” she said, her voice husky. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The man’s grim expression softened. He looked unsure, like he hadn’t expected such an answer and didn’t know quite what to do with it. His eyes, brown once more, were fixed aimlessly on a corner of the floor, as he sat silent, apparently lost in thought.

He sighed. “Thank you,” he said, his voice full of an emotion she couldn’t identify. 

Then he seemed to come back to himself, and back to the matter at hand. “I’ll put you back to bed, now, and change your shirt.” A little of that stiff awkwardness crept back into his voice, and his embarrassment reassured her that she was right to trust him. A bad man wouldn’t have been so uncomfortable about the idea of undressing her.

“All right,” she agreed.

He carefully wrapped the topmost blanket around her, then lifted her into his arms as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. He wound throbbed with pain at the movement, despite his care, but she bit her lips and managed not to cry out. She pressed her face into his shoulder and concentrated on taking slow, careful breaths as he took the few steps over to the bed, and gently laid her down.

He unwrapped the blanket as carefully as he had wrapped it around her, covered her with the sheet, and spread the blanket over it, not looking at her as he worked. Then he went to a storage chest, and came back with a clean shirt in his hands.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, his face averted, and said, “Try to keep still, and let me move you. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

“All right,” she said again.

He reached under the covers and slowly, carefully eased the shirt she wore up her body. He slid one hand under her back, lifting her slightly so he could pull the fabric up past her shoulders. Should she try to lift her arms out of the way? They felt as heavy as if they were made out of lead, but she found that she could move them, without straining the would across her midriff.

At the touch of his hand on the bare skin of her back, she blushed again. She was wearing nothing beneath the shirt but her pantalettes, and no matter how careful he was, surely it was impossible to remove one shirt, and put another on her, without the blankets that covered her falling away at some point and leaving her exposed to his eyes. Well, there was no help for it. 

And then, as if he had heard her thoughts, he said, as he eased the shirt over her head, “I can’t see anything, if it’s any comfort to you." 

"What do you mean?" she asked, puzzled.

"I’m blind.”

She stared at him in astonishment, startled out of her embarrassment. “Blind?” she repeated blankly.

“Completely blind,” he assured her, laying her head back down and gathering up the clean shirt. “You couldn’t tell?”

“No,” she answered, holding up her arms automatically to have the sleeves slid onto them, trying to make sense of this new shock. How could he be blind? She hadn’t had much time for observation, but she had seen him move around the room with complete assurance. No hesitation, no feeling his way.

To say nothing of the fight in the woods, though she had gotten only a brief look at him then before she blacked out. Never would it have occurred to her that he couldn’t see. It was true that he never looked her in the face, but that hadn’t been surprising under the circumstances.

“I noticed you weren’t looking at me,” she told him, as he lifted her again to gently draw the new shirt down over her body. “But I thought you were just respecting my modesty.”

“I do respect it,” he said seriously, laying her down, the length of the shirt bunched around her waist.

“I know,” she said, just as seriously.

His expression softened once again, but remained grave, and it occurred to her that she had never seen him smile.

“I’d like to change your bandages now,” he said, “And then you should rest, you must be tired.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She couldn’t remember ever having been so tired before. Every part of her felt heavy, and her eyelids began to droop as she watched him go to the table, and return with several strips of linen and a small pot.

She looked down as he removed the old bandage over her midriff, but she couldn’t see past the bunched-up shirt, and she was too tired to raise her head. It was probably just as well. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to see.

The man brought water, and cleaned her skin. The wound stung, and she drew in a hissing breath. But she held herself still, and tried to distract herself by watching him. His fingers moved gently over her skin, feeling delicately around the edges of the wound. He bent over her, holding his face close above the injury for a long moment, and she realized he must be smelling it, checking for any sign of the rank stink of infection.

Apparently satisfied, he straightened and picked up the small pot. A pungent, herbal smell came out when he removed the lid. He rubbed some of the contents onto a pad of folded linen, and she saw that it was a salve of some kind. She held her breath when he placed the pad over the wound, braced for the sting of pain, and pressed her lips together hard while he wrapped strips of cloth around her, holding the dressing in place. When he was finished, she breathed a sigh of relief.

He eased her shirt down over the bandages, and pulled up the bedclothes to cover her, lifting her arms to lie on top. Then he pushed up her sleeves, revealing bandages on her arms that she hadn’t noticed until now. She remembered knives slashing at her in the forest while she lifted her arms to defend herself, and suppressed a shudder.

He cleaned and re-bandaged those injuries, which hurt far less than the long slice in her abdomen had, and tucked her arms under the covers.

She could feel sleep tugging at her, pulling her under, but she managed to ask, “How bad is it?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know how long human injuries take to heal,” he admitted. “But they are healing. You’re going to be fine, I think, now that the fever is past. Sleep now.”

She closed her eyes, reassured, listening to the quiet sounds he made putting away his linen and his pot of salve. “Thank you,” she murmured, and slid into sleep.

Matthew had a lot to think about, once the woman was asleep. He had never expected her to recognize him. She had barely had a chance to see him during the fight, and he had been sure that she would never connect a brief glimpse of a furious kodor with his usual human appearance.

But she had. She knew what he was. And while that meant he didn’t need to think up a story about who he was and what she was doing in his house, the danger of her knowing the truth could be far more significant.

He was safe enough for now, while she remained in his house—as long as no one else found them. He would have to ask her, the next time she woke, whether anyone would be searching for her. But once she was well again, and left him, she would go back to living among humans, who would surely hate and fear kodors, as humans always did.

Would she tell anyone that he was here? He knew so little about her. Only that she seemed fairly prosperous, she was running away, she was brave and honest. 

And, of course, the astonishing fact that she wasn’t afraid of him.

He had pushed her, trying to make her admit to fear, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He didn’t _want_ her to be afraid of him. But he had spent the last two years convinced that humans would always fear kodors, and hate them. Was he so determined to keep on believing it that he would try to frighten a sick woman, who had surely suffered enough already?

He felt a wave of shame, mixed with admiration for her. She had refused to be frightened. She knew what he was, and she had called him _kind,_ and said she wasn’t afraid. Her voice might be weak, but her heartbeat had never faltered as she said the words. 

But what would she do, once she left here? He realized, somewhat to his surprise, that he wanted to trust her. Surely she would understand the danger of telling anyone about him. But his years of bitterness toward humans were hard to shake off. She could call a mob down on his head with a word, could destroy him as his father had been destroyed.

The best thing he could do, he decided, was to be very careful of her dignity, and give her no cause for offense. If she thought well of him when she left, she wouldn’t want to harm him.

She had shown herself to be a sensible woman so far, accepting the necessity of him handling her body, and not blaming him for the unavoidable indignities of their situation. But it would be prudent to avoid any unnecessary intimacy.

The next time she woke, he must try and remember to speak to her more formally. He had never had any long-term acquaintance with any human besides his mother, and he had no idea what might give accidental offense. Formal courtesy should make it harder to make an inadvertent mistake, and, he hoped, would demonstrate good intent if he did offend somehow.

That decided, he shook out the pile of bedding on the floor and settled himself for the night. The woman’s scent clung to the blankets, reminding him how long it had been since he had smelled anyone else’s presence in this house but his own. He remembered how he had grieved when his father’s scent had faded from all his belongings, inevitable but still heartbreaking.

Now, he wasn’t alone anymore, and he had no idea how to feel about that. He curled into the blankets, her scent surrounding him, and soon fell asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

When Karen woke, the room was filled with daylight. The shutters over the windows had been opened, and she could see dappled sunlight outside, and trees. Looking around, she saw the man—the kodor—in front of the fireplace, bending down to stir a pot that hung suspended over the flames.

“Good morning,” she said.

He turned at once, and came to the bedside. “Afternoon,” he replied. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she answered, smiling. “I feel tired, but I think the pain is less.”

His face was as grave as ever, but he nodded. “Good. It’s not surprising you’re tired, you’ve had no food for several days. I’ll bring you some soup.”

He went and got the pile of blankets that were folded neatly on the floor, with a pillow on top, and brought them to the bed. “You shouldn’t try to sit up on your own yet,” he told her. “While that gash is healing, you mustn’t strain the flesh at all. Keep yourself relaxed, and I’ll prop you up so you can eat more easily.”

He waited until she answered, “All right,” before touching her, then slipped an arm behind her shoulders and gently raised her up. He placed the extra bedding on top of her pillow, so when he laid her back down, she was half sitting. He went and got a bowl off a shelf, dished out some of the contents of the pot over the fire, and brought it to her.

She tried to reach for it, but her arms felt weak and her hands shook. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to help me,” she said.

He made no reply, but sat down on the edge of the bed and took up the spoon. The broth was warm and savory and soothing to her dry throat, the meat and vegetables cut up small and cooked soft, to be easier to eat. The smell and taste of food made her suddenly ravenous, and she ate eagerly until the bowl was empty.

“Thank you,” she said, with a deep sigh.

“You’re welcome,” he answered. He took the bowl over to the table, then brought the chair back with him to the bedside and sat down.

“Now, that you’re feeling better, Miss, we should talk,” he said. “First of all, it’s time we introduced ourselves. My name is Matthew.”

“I’m Karen,” she said. “Karen Page.”

“Will you tell me something about yourself, Miss Page? You said you were running away, and I need to know if anyone will be looking for you.”

“Please, call me Karen.” 

He shook his head. “I have no right to use your first name, we hardly know each other. I may not be human, but even I know it wouldn’t be proper.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that you have no manners,” she said, feeling awkward. She hoped she hadn’t offended him. “But if I’m going to be Miss Page, then what is your surname?”

“I don’t have one. Kodors have no need for them, there are so few of us.”

She frowned. “But I can’t just call you Matthew, as if you were a servant.”

He shrugged. “What choice is there? I don’t mind.”

But Karen minded. If he was going to insist on formality, then it must apply equally to both of them. She refused to show him any less respect than he was showing her. Well, there was no point in arguing about it. She would think of something.

She returned to his question. “Yes, I will be searched for. I had counted on my parents thinking I had gone south, toward Maple Plain, but when they don’t find me there someone will think to look north.”

“You’re running away from your parents?” He frowned. Why would she want to leave her family?

“I’m running away from the marriage they arranged for me,” she said grimly. “They meant well, they honestly think he’s a fine man, but I can’t bear him. And they wouldn’t listen to my objections.”

“Could they make you marry him, against your will?” Matthew knew nothing of human marriage customs, but he hoped that wasn’t one of them.

“The temple forbids forced marriage,” she answered. “But Fagan Corners, where I’m from, has no temple of its own. I was running to Richfield to seek sanctuary in their temple, and ask for an injunction against the marriage. I didn’t really have a plan for after that—it all depended on whether or not my parents would forgive me for running away.”

“And your brother came with you to protect you on the road?”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “He understood why I didn’t want to marry, but he didn’t think he could convince our parents, any more than I could. But he wanted to help me somehow, so he offered to come with me, to keep me safe. He was going to go back home again, once I was in Richfield. Oh!” she exclaimed. “When searchers come up the mountain, they’ll find his body!” They would know she had come this way, and she still might be found before she could reach the temple.

“No, they won’t,” he said. “I went back to the road, and moved the bodies. I took the bandits deep into the forest and left them for the wolves. But your brother I brought back here, and buried him.”

Karen was speechless, diverted from her fear of pursuit. The thought of Kevin’s body, lying in the road to be pecked at by ravens and gnawed by wolves, was a horror she had been trying not to think about. And this man—kodor— _Matthew_ —had buried him?

“There’s a clearing behind the house, where my parents are buried,” he went on. “I buried him beside them.”

“Oh,” she managed, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, sir. That was kind of you. Thank you.”

He felt a small, warm glow of satisfaction, that he had managed to give her some comfort for her loss. “I would have brought you his things, but the one who was robbing him ran away while I was fighting the others. Your brother had nothing left but the clothes he wore. But I’ll show you where he lies, once you’re well enough to get up and go outside, if you like,” he offered.

“Thank you,” she said again, her throat tight.

They sat together in silence for a minute or two. Matthew felt relieved to know that his guest wasn’t a fugitive criminal, but just a woman fleeing a situation she never should have been in in the first place. Why would her parents want her to marry a man she didn’t like? _Don’t be too inquisitive,_ he told himself. _She’s told you what you needed to know, don’t press her._

He stood up and went to the shelves on the wall, taking down several jars and a bowl. He measured out spoonfuls of herbs from each jar into the bowl, then went to the fire and set a small pot of water to heat.

Karen pulled herself together, swallowing the lump in her throat, and brought her mind back to her previous concern. “When searchers do come this way, will they find the house? You won’t tell them I’m here, will you?”

He returned to his chair by her side, and sat down. “Of course not. If I hear any sign of humans on the road, I’ll avoid them. The last thing I want is anyone knowing I’m here.”

“Oh, of course,” she murmured. “I didn’t think. But the house?”

“It’s far enough from the road to be hidden, unless someone comes into the forest and looks. And there’s no reason for them to do that. You’re safe here, Miss Page.”

“Good. Thank you.” She sighed with relief. “Now can I ask you something about yourself?” she asked. “You don’t have to answer, if you find it too personal. But I can’t help being curious.”

“What is it?”

“Well…why do you look human? That night, during the fight, you were obviously a kodor. But now…I’ve never heard that kodors could change their appearance.”

He could imagine well enough what she _had_ heard. Well, he didn’t mind telling her. “They can’t,” he answered. “I’m actually only half kodor, my mother was human. My father looked…the way I looked during the fight, always. There’s a lot I don’t know about my mother, she died when I was just a child. But she must have been a remarkable woman, to fall in love with my father instead of running away.”

“She lived with him, here in the forest?”

“It sounds unlikely, I know. But yes. I never knew where she came from, or who her family were. I could tell as I got older that it made my father sad to talk about her, so I didn’t ask as many questions as I wanted to.”

Karen was touched. This portrait of loving family life was completely at odds with everything she had ever heard about kodors, but she never thought of doubting him. “It must be lonely for you now, without them,” she said softly.

He sighed. “I miss them, of course. My father especially, he only died two years ago. But kodors are naturally solitary. Being alone doesn’t bother me.”

Two years ago? She looked at him with new attention, several different pieces of information suddenly fitting together in her mind. She had been wondering how he could be the kodor of the mountain, who she had heard about all her life, when he appeared to be no older than she was. But now she realized the truth.

“Your father,” she said. “You told me before that he was killed. He was hunted, by humans.”

His expression sharpened. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

“A little over two years ago, in the summer, a group of strangers rode into Fagan Corners one night. They went to the tavern, and drank, and boasted that they had killed the kodor who lived on the mountain.”

Matthew felt himself tensing as if for a fight. “Who were they?” he demanded. “Where were they from?”

Karen stared at his eyes, which had begun to glow bronze. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I wasn’t in the tavern, I heard about it the next day, after they had left. I don’t think they said where they came from, I certainly never heard it if they did. And they’ve never come back since.”

He could hear a thread of tension in her voice, but her heartbeat remained steady.

“What would you do, if I could tell you where to find them?” she asked. “Would you hunt them down? Would you kill them?”

 _Yes._ He knew his face must be saying it, even if his voice didn’t. “My father wasn’t evil, no matter what humans think,” he said angrily. “He had a violent streak, we all do, but the only people he ever harmed were ones who deserved it, like the men who attacked you the other night. He was a good person.”

“I believe you,” she said, surprisingly. “I know that you’re a good person, and from what you’ve told me about him, I’m sure your father was, too. They were wrong, to kill him just because they assumed he must be bad.” Her voice grew harder. “I don’t blame you for wanting vengeance. I would want vengeance against the men who killed my brother, if you hadn’t killed them already. I’m glad you did.”

He heard in her voice an implacable anger he understood very well, though he hadn’t expected it from her. And he knew she was angry not only at the ones who had killed her brother, but at the ones who had killed his father, as well. His own anger dissipated in sheer surprise, that she would take his part against her own kind.

Karen watched the tension drain out of him, as his eyes returned to brown. “Thank you,” he said. “I never thought a human would say killing a kodor was wrong.”

She felt a little ashamed of the fact that, at the time, she had felt no particular sorrow over the kodor's death. All her life, she had never thought to question the things she had been told about them. But now, facing the kodor’s son, after everything he had told her, she couldn’t help but feel grief for that death, and shame for her own earlier indifference.

“I might not have said it, a week ago,” she admitted. “And two years ago, I wasn’t sure if the kodor of the mountain was even real, or was just a rumor. But now I know better. And I’m truly sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” he said, surprised and touched. But then he frowned, thinking about the rest of what she had said. “You heard rumors about my father? We were always careful not to be seen by humans, I didn’t think anyone knew we were here…until he was killed, that is.”

“Rumors, yes. Nothing more. As a child I believed them, of course—children like to believe in fantastic tales. But as I got older, I wondered if they were true. I didn’t doubt that kodors exist, of course, but I did wonder if there were really one living on this mountain. It was never more than rumor, I never heard of anyone who could say for a fact that they had seen him, until the men who killed him came and told the whole town.”

“I’ll have to be even more careful, then,” he muttered, as if to himself.

Karen suddenly felt cold at the idea of anything happening to him. “You look human, though,” she pointed out, reassuring herself as much as him. “That should help keep you safe, if anyone did catch sight of you.” 

And then a new thought occurred to her. “How is it—” she began, and stopped. Surely his father’s death was the last thing he wanted to talk about.

“How is what?” he asked.

She flushed. “Don’t tell me, if you’d rather not. I only wondered why you’re still alive, when your father was killed.”

“It’s all right, Miss Page.” He sighed. “I happened to be away from home at the time. I had gone to a town, miles away from here, to buy supplies at the market. I can go places where my father never could, as long as I keep my hat on and my eyes covered. When I came home, I found him. Lying in the road, with a stick of hellbane driven through his shoulder.”

She felt a wave of pity and horror. “Oh, sir. How awful. I’m so sorry.”

He ducked his head, and swallowed the lump that rose in his throat. “Thank you,” he said again, quietly. 

The water on the fire was boiling, and he went and poured it carefully into his bowl of herbs, leaving them to steep.

Karen thought about everything she had just learned about the kodor and his unlikely family, and she had an idea.

“What was your mother’s surname?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“It was Murdock,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Would you object to being called by her surname, since you have none of your own? It’s better than calling you ‘sir’.”

“You could just call me Matthew,” he pointed out.

“And you could just call me Karen,” she replied.

He frowned. Surnames were a human invention, and he wasn’t human. Was she trying to deny what he was, by insisting on giving him a human name?

But no, that wasn’t fair. After all, he had been intending to hide from her what he was, if she hadn’t been so quick to recognize him—and he was the one who had decided on formal human courtesy as the proper mode between them. He had no right to be offended if she was determined to treat him as he was treating her.

“All right,” he agreed. “If I must have a surname, by all means let it be my mother’s.”

“Very well, then, Mister Murdock. If I can’t persuade you to first names, at least now we’re equal.”

She sounded pleased, and he realized that this was more than simply not fearing him. This was respect. Not denying what he was, but treating him like a person, not a monster. Like an equal, as she said.

Silence fell between them once more, each of them thinking their own thoughts.

After a few minutes Matthew went and checked the temperature of his herbal infusion, then strained it into a cup and brought it to the bed.

“Drink this, it will help you heal,” he said.

She felt a little stronger now that she had eaten, and was able to hold the cup for herself, but her hands still shook. He steadied it for her, and gently lifted up her head. Her body craved liquid after her fever, and she drank deeply. It was the same drink he had given her on her first night here, before the fever had taken hold.

When she had finished, he said, “I have some things to take care of outside. We need more firewood, and I’d like to check my snares.”

“Of course,” she answered. “I’ll be fine, you don’t have to stay with me constantly.”

“If you need anything, call for me. I have sharper hearing than a human, as long as I’m near the house I’ll hear you.”

“All right. Thank you.”

She watched him put on a thick woolen jacket, not as warm as a cloak since it covered less of him, but which left his arms free to move. He picked up an axe from the corner near the door, and she wondered how a blind man could chop wood he couldn’t see. But before she could ask, he opened the door and was gone.

Matthew surveyed the clearing behind the house. His woodpile was greatly diminished, after days of hardly leaving the house. He would need to go into the woods and gather more. But it could wait until tomorrow. What he had here was enough for another day or two, once he had chopped the larger branches into fireplace-sized logs, and broken down the smaller into kindling. He set to work, thinking about the woman inside. 

For the last two years, he had felt no curiosity about any of the humans he came into contact with. When he went out to buy supplies, he talked to the merchants he bought from no more than necessary. And when he grew out his horns and went looking for a fight, he didn’t want to know anything about the people he found except who were the predators, and who were the prey. The people he protected feared him as much as the criminals did, and it had seemed obvious to him that there could never be any real, personal connection between humans and himself.

But Miss Page (he refused to let himself think of her as Karen, even in the privacy of his own mind) was different. Every conversation they had made him want to know more about her. She was unlike any other human he had ever met. With the possible exception of his mother, but she had died when he was still too young to know her as a person, and not just as his mother. He couldn’t judge how alike they might be. But they clearly had in common a willingness to look beyond what they had been taught, and to judge by their own experience.

He gathered up an armful of split logs and carried them inside, pausing on the threshold to listen. The slow, steady heartbeat and quiet breathing coming from the bed told him that Miss Page had fallen asleep. He filled the woodbox as quietly as he could, and she slept on undisturbed.

His nose wrinkled at the sour smell of the sweat-soaked bedsheets he had bundled into a corner last night. He had better do a load of washing tomorrow, while the mild weather held. It was too late to begin now, it was nearly evening, and he still had his snares to check. He picked up the pile of linen and put it in the storeroom, piling it up in the washtub, and headed out into the woods.

His snares had caught a couple of rabbits. They were lean animals, but he had lard at home that he had bought during hog-butchering time, and he could rub them well with fat before putting them in a pot to roast with some vegetables from his storeroom. He tied them together and slung them over his shoulder, leaving his hands free to pick up any convenient fallen branches he happened to find on his way back.

Miss Page was still sleeping quietly when he got home, so once he had prepared the rabbits and put the pot on the fire to cook, he went back out to gather more wood. There had been little snow so far, but he knew the storms of winter would soon arrive. Best to bring home as much wood as he could now, before everything was buried in snow.

When he finally came back inside, he could smell roast rabbit and parsnips, and Miss Page was awake.

“Hello,” she greeted him.

“Hello,” he answered. “How are you feeling? Are you hungry?”

“Yes, a little. Dinner smells good.”

“I was going to give you more soup, but I can cut up some rabbit for you, too, if you’d like.”

“Meat helps to build new blood, my mother says,” she answered, which he took for _yes._ She sounded a little sad when she mentioned her mother, and he wondered if she was missing her family.

He helped her to eat her dinner, then took back the extra bedding she had been propped up on and laid her down on her own pillow. He checked and re-bandaged her injuries before sitting down to his own dinner, and, as he had hoped, she had fallen back asleep by the time he finished eating. 

He put away the leftover food in the storeroom, where it would keep cold at this time of year, and washed the dishes and put them away. Once all the work was done, he banked the fire for the night, made his own bed on the floor, and was soon asleep himself.


	7. Chapter 7

When Karen woke the next day, she was alone. The daylight coming in the windows today was dimmer, with none of yesterday’s sunlight and shadow. The sky must be overcast. She could hear the thwack of an axe cutting through wood, just outside, so she knew Mr. Murdock was nearby.

Looking around the room, she saw a neatly folded pile of bedding on the floor near the fireplace, and remembered that it had lain there yesterday, too, until Mr Murdock had used it to prop her up in her bed. She hadn’t given it a thought before, but now she realized that he must be sleeping on the floor since he took her in.

She felt a pang of conscience at driving him from his bed. But after all, what alternative was there? There was only one bed, and she was still far from well. Of course he had given it to her, she would have done the same in his place. But it made her think about just how much he was doing for her, and what an inconvenience it was for him to care for a sick woman.

Just then her stomach rumbled, and she knew she was going to have to inconvenience him further to get any food. She didn’t want to be a nuisance, but there was no help for it. She would be a much bigger nuisance if she tried to get up, and made the slice across her middle worse. And he had told her yesterday that if she needed anything while he was outside, she should call for him.

“Mister Murdock,” she called. Her voice was not very loud, but the sounds of chopping wood stopped at once. A moment later, the door opened and he was there.

“Miss Page,” he greeted her. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said. “I feel stronger, and my hands are steadier. But I’m afraid I’m hungry. I’m sorry to trouble you.”

“It’s no trouble,” he assured her. “Of course you’re hungry. I didn’t know when you’d wake, or I’d have had food ready for you. I had my own breakfast earlier.” He went to the fire and picked up a pot sitting on the hearth, putting it directly over the fire to heat. “That will be warm in just a few minutes,” he said.

While they waited, he brought her a cup from the table, and she saw that it was more of the herbal infusion. He must have made it earlier, to have ready for her when she woke. She reached out, and he handed her the cup, but stayed close to see if she could manage it alone. She lifted her head carefully, and was pleased to find that she could finally drink unassisted, in careful sips.

“Good,” he said in satisfaction, and for the first time she saw a brief, small smile cross his face. He got a bowl off the shelf, filled it from the pot over the fire, and brought it to her, with a fork. It was a hash made of the remains of last night’s rabbit and parsnips, with no liquid to spill, only solid, bite-sized pieces.

She reached out to take bowl and fork, determined to eat without his help. “I can manage, thank you,” she said, and he handed them over. While she began to eat, he brought the chair to the bedside. He refilled her cup with water and placed it on the chair, in easy reach, and brought her a napkin to spread over her chest.

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. Mindful that she had interrupted his work, she added, “Don’t let me keep you from your work, I’m fine.”

He nodded. “Call me if you need anything else,” he said, and went back out. A moment later she heard the wood chopping resume.

When she had finished eating, she set bowl, fork, and napkin on the chair, and lay back in the bed with a sigh. She felt like she had done nothing but sleep for days. Now that she was awake, and alone, she had time to think about her situation.

Until she was healed, she was stuck here, in the middle of nowhere, with a man she knew almost nothing about. She was not afraid of him, in fact she was beginning to realize that, as brusque as he was, she liked him. But he could still be alarming. Last night, when she had told him about the strangers who had killed his father, he had looked forbidding indeed, his expression grim, his eyes glowing.

“He had a violent streak, we all do.” He had said it about his father, but it was clear that he included himself in that statement. He was a dangerous person. But she was certain that he would never harm her.

She found herself wondering what Kevin would think of him, and without warning, tears came to her eyes. How long would it be before she could think of her brother without weeping? She took a shaky breath, and blinked away the tears. Dangerous or not, Mr. Murdock had been kindness itself about Kevin, holding her hand and offering patient sympathy, and then going to the considerable effort of burying his body. Clearly, he had a good heart.

_Mr. Murdock,_ she thought, and sighed. He was right, propriety dictated that they not call each other by their first names. But propriety could be a lonely thing. Her heart was sore with everything that had happened to her—not only the attack on herself, and Kevin’s death, but also the shock of her mother ordering her to marry, and the realization that her father wouldn’t help her. 

She hadn’t had time to dwell on those things before, busy with her plans. But now she had time. Her faith in her family, her unquestioned belief that they would support her and protect her, had been deeply shaken. She felt alone, more alone than she had ever felt in her whole life.

She would have welcomed a friend, and wished she could get better acquainted with Mr. Murdock. But by insisting on formality, he was keeping a deliberate distance between them.

Just then the door opened, and he came inside. He set down his axe, and opened the other door she had noticed in the corner.

“I’m going to take a load of washing to the stream,” he told her, stepping through the door and coming back with a washtub piled with linen. He must have a storeroom, she realized. “Is there anything you need, before I go?”

“No, I’m fine.” She would have liked some company, but plainly he had things to do.

“I’m sorry to leave you alone so much today, Miss Page,” he said, “but the weather is changing. I want to get done as much as I can outdoors, before it snows. I should have started this earlier, the sheets will need to hang outside to dry.”

“Of course,” she said, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt. “I’m sorry I can’t help, that’s a miserable job to do by yourself.”

“I’m used to it,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll try not to be too long.”

He went out, leaving Karen alone with her thoughts once more.

The idea that it would snow soon worried her. Snow would make traveling slower and more difficult. And this enforced delay meant that anyone searching for her might be looking toward Richfield, by the time she was able to resume her journey. She had counted on beating both the weather and the searchers, and now she was forced to wait, while both of them crept up inexorably behind her.

Forced on the care of a man who was kind, and a knowledgeable healer, but who she had no reason to think actually wanted her here.

_Miss Page._ Maybe he was just trying to be polite—but maybe he simply wasn’t interested in getting better acquainted. It was an unwelcome thought, but she forced herself to examine it.

Why, after all, should he want to get to know her better? She would only be here temporarily, until her injuries healed and she could continue on her way to Richfield. He had every reason to hate humans, and anyway, he had told her that kodors were solitary by nature. He had taken her in and cared for her, but maybe…maybe he would be relieved to be rid of her, once she was recovered.

Her heart sank. She thought back over their conversations, and noticed how little he had told her about himself. And the questions he had asked about her didn’t necessarily imply any personal interest—he needed to know what sort of person he had taken under his roof, and whether or not he would have to beware of human search parties in his woods. Maybe that was where his curiosity ended, and there was nothing else he wanted to know.

She thought of him, washing his sheets in the icy stream, and frowned. He was right, he should have started that job earlier. She wasn’t sure how late she had slept, but she had the impression he had been up for hours already. At this time of year when the hours of daylight for drying the laundry outside were so short, he should have begun first thing in the morning. He must have put it off in order to stay close to the house until she woke, so he could bring her food, and anything else she needed. 

If the laundry didn't have time to dry before nightfall, he would have to bring it inside and then hang it out again tomorrow. She felt sure he would shrug it off as a minor inconvenience, but it was still an inconvenience, and it was because of her. And he wouldn’t have to wash his sheets today in the first place, if they hadn’t been soaked by her fever-sweat. No matter how she looked at it, all she did was make more work for him. 

Yes, he would probably be relieved when she finally left. She lay in bed and brooded, feeling utterly useless.

* * *

Miss Page was right, washing sheets was a miserable job, especially at this time of year. The stream wasn’t frozen over yet, but ice rimmed the edges, and the water was breathtakingly cold. He could have heated the water in the washtub, at least, where he soaped the linen and scrubbed it well against the washboard before rinsing in the stream, but it would have taken time, and he wanted to get this done as soon as possible.

The sheets were large, unwieldy things to manage in the flowing current. Matthew crouched on the bank, trying not to splash himself any more than he could help as he dunked the sodden, freezing fabric, finally lifting it clear and wringing it out. The sweat-soaked shirt, and a few other items of his own clothing he had decided to add to the load, were much easier to deal with.

When everything was clean, and he had wrung out as much water as he could, he carried it all back home to the clearing behind the house. There was a clothesline stretched from one corner of the cabin to a nearby tree, and he hung up all the laundry. The smaller things, at least, might be dry by sundown.

He heard the cry of a grouse while he worked, coming from the direction of one of his snares, and after he had finished with the laundry he went to check. Sure enough, the snare had caught a nice plump bird. He made sure it was dead, then carried it back to the house.

He listened for Miss Page as he approached, and found she was awake, and in no apparent distress, but very still. Should he greet her, when he went inside? It seemed foolish to say “I’m back,” when that would be obvious. Did humans always greet each other, every time they came and went? He simply didn’t know. Asking “How do you feel?” might be tiresome for her, when she had told him she was fine only a short time ago.

He and his father had been so accustomed to each other, and so close, sometimes they hardly needed to speak to understand each other. But Miss Page was still largely an unknown. Saying nothing might be better than saying something annoying. He could just leave it to her to say something, if she chose, and then he could answer. Maybe that would be best.

* * *

Mr. Murdock returned, a dead grouse in his hands, already plucked and cleaned. He took off his heavy jacket, got out a board and a meat cleaver, and began cutting the bird into pieces for cooking.

He didn’t speak to her, but he might think she was asleep. Karen remained silent, too, continuing her unwelcome train of thought. Watching him go into the storeroom for vegetables, she couldn’t help but think about the fact that he was sharing his food with her, depleting what he had stored up to last him through the winter. And she could do nothing useful for him in return, she couldn’t even sit up without his help. The truth of the matter was, she was a burden.

Once he had carried the pot over to the fire—it would be a stew, from the look of it—he emptied the last of the rabbit hash into a bowl and came to the bed. 

“You are quiet, Miss Page,” he said. “Are you well? Is there anything you need?”

So he had known she was awake, and had chosen not to talk to her. Her heart sank even further.

“I’m fine, Mister Murdock, thank you. I was just wishing I could be of some use, instead of lying here doing nothing.”

“You don’t need to do anything, I’m used to managing alone. And anyway you’re not well enough yet,” he said. “All you need to do is rest, and get better. Are you hungry?”

“No, not right now.” She realized that it must be hours since he had eaten breakfast, and he was going to eat the hash himself—unless she wanted it. She went on, “Please, eat your lunch and don’t mind me.”

He nodded, and went to sit on the pile of bedding beside the fire.

“Don’t you want your chair?” she asked, aware that her dishes were still sitting on it.

“This is warmer,” he answered. “Doing the washing was cold work.”

He ate his lunch quietly. He seemed perfectly comfortable with silence, which only made sense, since he was used to being alone. Karen would have preferred conversation, but she wasn’t going to make him talk to her if he didn’t want to. She couldn’t help dwelling on the idea, like poking at a bruise, that she was a nuisance he would be glad to get rid of. She wanted to see if he would start a conversation, if she said nothing.

He didn’t, until he had finished eating and was preparing to go back outside again.

“I’m going to go back out now and gather as much wood as I can, before the snow comes and buries everything,” he said. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

He brought her a fresh cup of water, put his jacket back on, and left, leaving her alone again and more despondent than ever.

She wished that she could help him, but she knew it was a futile wish. If she were well enough to work outdoors, then she would be well enough to be on her way, and take herself off his hands. If only she could sit up, at least she could do any mending he might have on hand. Surely sewing wouldn’t strain her healing injuries. But for now, she would have to remain idle. Idle and useless.

If she had examined her feelings more closely, she might have seen that her depression had its roots in grief for her brother’s death, and guilt. But she wasn’t strong enough yet to confront those feelings. It was easier to fixate on the idea that she was a burden, that Mr. Murdock didn’t really care about her at all, but had taken her in purely out of charity. He didn’t want her here. And why should he, when her own parents weren’t even willing to keep her any longer?

She fell into a doze eventually, worn out by her own thoughts.

* * *

As he gathered wood in the forest, Matthew wondered what was troubling Miss Page. He could tell _something_ was. When she had said she wished she could do something useful, it had been…not quite a lie, but maybe not the whole truth.

She had something on her mind, clearly. But if she didn’t want to tell him, he wasn’t going to push. It wasn’t as if he had any right to her confidence, they still barely knew each other. And, after all, what little he did know about her would have been more than enough to explain her low spirits, if not for the fact that her spirits had unquestionably been better yesterday.

Well, if she preferred not to talk, he would respect that. He wasn’t bothered by silence, he and his father had sometimes spent hours together without speaking. But then, they had both had things to occupy them. Miss Page was forced into idleness, no longer sleeping all day, but unable yet to leave her bed.

He regretted having to leave her without any company all day today, afraid that she would be bored and restless. But when he had gone inside and spent a little time with her while he ate his lunch, she had said nothing. He tried to ignore the sharp, unfamiliar pang it gave him, knowing that she was awake and had nothing to do, and yet she chose not to talk to him.

He should have been relieved, he supposed, that she wasn’t expecting him to make conversation just to keep her occupied. But, somehow, he wasn’t.

He listened for her when he brought back a load of wood, and found she had fallen asleep. Good. Sleep would help her heal, and if she was sleeping, she wouldn’t be wishing for something to do.

He hauled wood until evening, and studied the weather. The changes he could feel in temperature, air pressure, humidity, all warned him that that snow was coming. If not tomorrow, then the next day.

He took his washing off the line, the sheets still damp, and folded them up. He would hang them out again tomorrow, if the snow held off.

When he came inside and put the damp linen in the storeroom, Miss Page woke up.

“Good evening,” he said. He wanted to break this unusual silence between them somehow, and he decided that a greeting might not be necessary, but it was at least polite. He was determined to be courteous, even if she didn’t feel like talking.

“Good evening,” she answered, her voice dull. He felt a dart of concern, but then, she had just woken. Maybe she was simply tired.

“The wash didn’t get dry?” she asked.

“Some of it did,” he answered, folding up his clothes and putting them away in a storage chest. “I can hang the sheets out again tomorrow. Are you hungry?” She ought to be, by now.

“I suppose so,” she answered, still sounding dull, as if it didn’t matter much, and his concern intensified. Could her fever be coming back? He listened carefully to her heartbeat, and gauged the heat coming off her skin when he brought her a bowl of stew. No sign of fever. 

He reminded himself that she had ample reasons to be feeling sad, and busied himself propping her up in the bed and spreading the napkin over her chest once again. He brought the chair back to the table, and sat down with his own bowl of stew.

Dinner was a quiet meal, with no extraneous conversation. Miss Page thanked him whenever he brought her anything, or took away her empty bowl, but beyond that she had nothing to say.

She was listless when he checked her injuries, his hands on her bare skin raising neither a blush nor a wince of pain.

“This is healing well,” he told her. “Does it hurt any less?” 

She paused before replying, as if she needed to think about it. “Yes, I think so,” she finally answered. “I haven’t noticed the pain much today, I think it is better.”

“Good,” he said. He wanted to lift her spirits, but didn’t know how. He gently covered her back up, wishing he knew what to say. She said nothing more, so he didn’t, either, silently unfolding his blankets and preparing himself for bed.

* * *

Karen woke up earlier the next day, but Mr. Murdock was still awake before her, and already busy. He came in from outside with an armload of wood, and filled the woodbox by the fireplace.

“Good morning,” he greeted her.

“Good morning,” she replied, although she didn’t see anything particularly good about it. Her black thoughts from yesterday were still with her. But that was no reason to be rude.

“It’s colder today, and the wind’s rising,” he told her. “I’m glad I hauled so much wood yesterday. I want to get more of it chopped up before the storm hits, but once that’s done I’ll be able to spend more time inside today.”

“That’s good,” she said, glad that he would be able to stay warm, even if he had to share his space with a useless, unwanted guest.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, while he propped her up in the bed.

“Fine,” she answered briefly. 

He paused, as if he wanted to say something, but then thought better of it. He brought the chair over to the bed as he had yesterday, brought her food and a cup of his herbal infusion, and went back outside. 

She listened to the thwack of his axe, and the sounds of him piling the cut logs in a stack against the cabin wall outside. At least there was one thing she hadn’t made worse for him by being here—he wasn’t burning any more firewood because of her than he would have by himself. It was small comfort.

He came back inside after a while, and took off his jacket. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

“A cup of water?” she requested, and he brought it to her at once.

“You could have called me,” he said, looking troubled.

“It could wait until you came back. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no bother,” he said. He paused, as he had earlier, but once again decided against whatever it was he wanted to say.

He busied himself raking some of the ashes out of the fireplace and shoveling them into a bucket. The fire was kept burning constantly at this time of year to keep the cabin warm, and ashes accumulated quickly. While a layer of ash would insulate the stones underneath the logs and help the fire burn, the excess needed to be cleared out periodically. 

He emptied the bucket outside, then brought the chair back to the table, got out a whetstone, and sat down to sharpen his tools. Mostly knives of different kinds, but also his axe, and what looked like a set of chisels.

Karen lay listlessly in bed watching him, thinking the same thoughts she had yesterday. She wished he would talk to her, but was unwilling to bother him or distract him from his work. If she couldn’t do anything to help, she could at least not hinder him unnecessarily.

Lunch was another quiet meal, neither of them saying much. After they had eaten, Mr. Murdock went outside again briefly, and came back with his arms full of linen, and Karen realized he must have hung the damp sheets out first thing in the morning, before she woke up. Now that they were finally dry, he folded them up and put them away in a chest.

The afternoon passed like the morning, with Karen watching Mr. Murdock do his household tasks, feeling useless, determined not to make a nuisance of herself any more than she could help. She dozed off after a while, as she had yesterday.

When she woke, he was preparing their dinner. She could hear the wind blowing through the trees outside, and shivered. She thought suddenly of her brother, lying in the cold ground out there while she was safe and warm in here, and covered her mouth with both hands to muffle the small cry of distress that burst from her involuntarily.

“Miss Page?” Mr. Murdock had heard, of course.

She shook her head, swallowing down the lump in her throat. “I’m fine,” she managed. “I just…thought of my brother suddenly, that’s all.” She glanced over at him, and saw that his face was full of sympathy.

After a moment, he said softly, “After my mother died, my father told me that the grief we felt was a measure of how much we loved her.”

Even in her misery, she was touched. “That’s a nice thought,” she said, feeling comforted despite herself. How kind he was. And at least Kevin was buried, thanks to him, and not lying out in the open on such a raw night. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He smiled sadly, and went on with his cooking. Karen sighed to herself, very quietly. The kinder he was, the more she regretted being such a burden to him, and the more she wished that he liked her, and might at least have some pleasure in her company. 

But she couldn’t fault him for his indifference. The fact that he had taken her in at all was more than she had any right to expect, and it would be ungrateful indeed to complain about the impersonal kindness with which he treated her.

The evening was just the same as yesterday. A quiet dinner; the nightly examination of her injuries, which only reminded her of her helplessness; and then lying silently in the bed, listening guiltily while Mr. Murdock settled himself for the night on the floor, until she finally fell asleep.

* * *

Matthew woke in the middle of the night, hearing a strained, quiet sound coming from the bed. He listened closely, and realized that Miss Page was awake, and was crying, muffling her sobs in the blanket.

He got up at once, wrapping a blanket around himself and going to sit on the edge of the bed. Her continuing silence all day had worried him, but he had hesitated to say anything, unsure if trying to get her to talk would help, or offend her. But now he didn’t hesitate. Crying alone at night was more than just a disinclination for conversation.

“Miss Page, what’s the matter?” he asked gently.

“My name is Karen!” she cried, and sobbed harder, no longer bothering to muffle the sound.

Matthew was taken aback, but the correct answer to that was obvious. Her feelings were more important than proper manners.

“Karen, then,” he said, as gently as before. “What’s troubling you? You’ve barely spoken for two days. It can’t be your injuries, they’re getting better every day. Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Only my own foolishness,” she managed through her tears.

He shook his head gravely. “No, that can’t be. You were in better spirits two days ago, and you’ve had very little scope for foolishness between then and now. What’s happened, to upset you like this?” He wanted to ask if he had done something to hurt her, but he restrained himself, waiting to see what she would say.

She took a minute to get control of herself, gulping down her sobs and breathing deeply. Finally, she said, “I know that you took me in out of charity, nothing more. But I was lonely, and I wanted to befriend you, and so at first I didn’t realize that’s not what you want. You have no reason to love humans, and I don’t blame you a bit. And you told me kodors are naturally solitary, and then you wanted to keep a formal distance between us….Two days ago, it finally occurred to me that I had no reason to think you wanted a friend.”

Matthew sat in silent astonishment, trying to take in what he was hearing. All their interactions, all his attempts to keep from offending her, were suddenly cast in a new light.

“And then,” she went on, “I’m realizing more and more just what an inconvenience I am to you. I’m eating your food, I’ve forced you from your bed, I make more work for you. And I can do nothing for you in return. You’ve been very kind, but it’s plain enough that I’m nothing but a burden.” She gulped again, and a fresh welling-up of tears forced her to stop there.

“I’m not as kind as you say,” he said softly, filled with remorse, “if my behavior has made you think so badly of yourself.” He wondered if it would be all right to take her hand, as he had once before—and then decided that he had spent far too much time worrying if he was going to offend her. She needed comfort, and she had just said she wanted a friend.

He took her hand, cradling it gently in both of his. “I thought…well. It doesn’t matter what I thought, I was wrong. It seems we’ve been misunderstanding each other.”

She lay still, her face turned toward him, clearly waiting to hear more. He did his best, picking his way carefully through unfamiliar emotions.

“It’s true that I’m used to being alone,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that your company is unwelcome, or that I don’t want your friendship. Before my father was killed, I used to enjoy going among humans and spending time with them. It’s only in these last few years that I’ve grown so bitter, and come to dislike humans so much.”

He paused, gathering his thoughts. Miss Pa— _Karen’s_ tears had stopped, and she was listening intently. “I would like, very much, for you and I to be better acquainted. I’m very sorry that I ever led you to think otherwise. You are _not_ nothing but a burden to me.”

“You haven’t been talking to me, either, these last two days,” she pointed out, sounding uncertain and a little forlorn. “I kept wishing you would, but I didn’t want to try and make you, if you didn’t want to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. I’m afraid I’m awkward at making conversation for its own sake, I simply don’t know what to say. My father wasn’t talkative, so I’m used to silence, even when I’m not alone. But you don’t seem to be like that, you talked enough at first, even with all the pain you were in. I wondered if something was wrong, when you stopped. But as long as it wasn’t your health getting worse, I didn’t want to force your confidence. I thought I was respecting your wishes by not encouraging you to talk.”

“And I thought I was respecting _your_ wishes, that you didn’t want to talk,” she said wonderingly. She turned her hand in his grasp, her fingers curling around his. “But why did you insist on calling me Miss Page?” she asked.

“As a sign of respect,” he answered. “I only ever interact with humans briefly, and so I was worried that I didn’t know enough about human customs to be sure I wouldn’t offend you somehow, living in close quarters like this. Especially considering the…the unavoidable indignities you have to put up with, because of your injuries, I thought it was important to balance that by giving you formal courtesy. It never occurred to me that you might see it as me keeping you at a distance. That was never my intention, honestly. I’m truly sorry.”

The relief almost made her giddy. She saw the trouble in his face, and squeezed his hand. “It was kindly meant,” she said. “As you said, we’ve been misunderstanding each other. I’m so glad to know how you really feel.” Now that she understood what he had been thinking, she felt as if a great weight had been lifted off her heart. He did like her, after all!

“I’m glad to know how you feel, too,” he said, and smiled—not the brief, small smile she had seen before, but a warm, _happy_ smile that lit up his whole face. She smiled, too, feeling better than she had since before she had left home.

“I’ve missed hearing your voice, these last two days,” Matthew added, a little shyly. He never would have said something so personal a few days ago, but now it felt right. She said nothing in reply, but she tugged on his hand, lifting it to her face, so he could feel her cheek curve as she smiled back at him.

Her skin was damp, and without thinking he brushed away the wetness left by her tears. Her cheek warmed under his fingers in a blush, and for an instant he wondered if such an intimate gesture was completely inappropriate. But she was still smiling, and really that was all that mattered.

He took her hand again, without hesitation. “Will you be able to sleep now, do you think?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” she answered. Her eyes felt heavy already, her body eager for the sleep her bitter thoughts had denied her. But she held onto his hand a moment longer, and asked, “Do you sleep all right, on the floor? Are you comfortable enough?”

“It’s fine,” he assured her, touched by her concern. It had been years since anyone had cared if he was sleeping well or not. “I’ve slept on the ground outside often enough, this is no worse.”

“All right, good,” she said warmly, sounding sleepy. “Good night, then, Matthew.”

He smiled again to hear her finally call him by his name. “Good night, Karen.”


	8. Chapter 8

The morning dawned dark and stormy, snow falling heavily and wind howling through the trees outside. Karen woke with a start, the room so dark that she thought for a moment that it was still night. But no, she could see daylight through the shutters, dim though it was. Thank the gods there was good glass in the windows, keeping out the wind, or the shutters would have been banging and rattling like an unquiet spirit.

She looked around the room, and saw that for once, she had woken before Matthew. He lay on the floor in front of the fireplace, wrapped in blankets, face half buried in his pillow, fast asleep. The creaking and moaning of the forest must be familiar sounds to him, who lived here, and not enough to wake him as they had woken her.

 _Matthew,_ she thought, and smiled. Not _Mr. Murdock._ A few hours ago, she had been so lonely and miserable that she couldn’t keep from crying, doing her best to muffle her sobs and not disturb her unwilling host. Only to find that he wasn't unwilling, after all, and they had completely misunderstood each other.

The room was chilly, the fire still banked from the night before, but the relief of knowing that she wasn’t as alone as she had thought, that Matthew did care about her, warmed her right through. It was still painful to think about her brother, or her parents, but she had one friend, at least.

She stretched, carefully. There was pain across her midriff, but much less than there had been a few days ago. She had hardly noticed the physical pain for the last two days, sunk in unhappiness as she had been, but now that she was paying attention she could feel the difference. And Matthew had said, hadn’t he, that her injuries were getting better every day? She stretched a little further, and yawned.

By the fire, Matthew stirred. He lifted his head, as if he were listening, and then he yawned, too.

“Good morning, Matthew,” she said, smiling.

He smiled back, a warm, happy smile like the one she had seen last night. How could she doubt he was glad to have her here, when he smiled at her like that?

“Good morning, Karen,” he answered. He crawled out of his blankets to poke the embers in the fireplace and wake them into new life, adding kindling and blowing until the wood caught fire.

Karen watched him as he folded up his bedding, went to the windows and opened the shutters, and walked over to the bucket to check how much water they had. She noticed again how easily he moved, how confidently he reached for a cup on the shelf, with no fumbling, despite his blindness.

He brought her the cup, filled with water, and asked, “How are you feeling?”

It was the same question he asked every day, but it felt different today, after their middle-of-the-night conversation.

“Much better, thank you,” she answered. “The pain is much less. And…I’m really glad we talked. I feel a lot happier.”

“I’m glad, too,” he answered, with another smile. “You sound happier, your voice is brighter.”

He seemed happier, too, if this sudden outbreak of smiles was anything to go by. Well, no wonder, if he’d been worrying that something was wrong with her, and then worrying that he’d offend her if he asked what it was. Thank goodness that was over now.

He set about making breakfast while Karen watched, and finally she asked the question that had been in the back of her mind for days.

“How can you do that so easily, when you can’t see?” she said. “I know this is your home, so you know where everything is. But still. You seem to know _exactly_ where everything is, you never have to feel around to find something. How do you do it?”

“I use my other senses,” he answered. “Kodors have more powerful senses than humans, did I mention that before?”

“You mentioned hearing.”

“Well, it’s true of the others as well. Touch and smell and taste, although I don’t use that one much for locating things. It’s mostly touch, and hearing, and smell. Most things have a smell, to me at least. And if something is moving, I can hear it. And touch…that one’s harder to explain.”

He paused, and frowned. “I can just… _feel_ where things are, without having to touch them. I can feel how the air moves around the room. It flows around objects, the way water flows around and over a stone in the bed of a stream. I can feel that flow, and so I know the location of the stone, and its size and shape. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, it does,” she replied, fascinated. “And that’s how you can do things like chop wood, when you can’t see the log? And fight men you can’t see?”

“Yes. I can feel where the log is, and smell it, too. Fighting, there’s a lot of information I can use. I can smell my opponents, and hear them, no matter how quiet they’re trying to be. I can feel the movements they make. And I can hear it if they fall unconscious, or die. I listen to their heartbeats.”

“You can hear people’s heartbeats?”

“Yes. And breathing, if I’m close enough, or they’re breathing hard.”

“Goodness,” said Karen, impressed. She tried to imagine what it would be like, to have senses as powerful as that. It sounded overwhelming. But then, he had had these senses his whole life, he must be used to it.

“Do you do a lot of fighting?” she asked. “You talk about it as if you have a lot of experience. And you certainly seemed to know what you were doing, the little I saw of you.” Further evidence that this was a dangerous person—but she knew him well enough by now not to feel concerned, just curious.

He didn’t answer immediately, but his expression was thoughtful as he went to pick up the pile of bedding from the floor and bring it to the bed. After he had propped her up on the pile of blankets and laid her gently back down, he remained sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I know what humans—most humans—think about kodors,” he said seriously, “So I can guess what sort of things you must have heard growing up. That we’re violent, that we attack humans.”

“That’s what people say, yes,” she confirmed cautiously, not wanting to offend him. “But that doesn’t make it true.”

That got her a small smile. “Not entirely true, no. But it’s not entirely false, either. Kodors do have a violent streak, it’s part of our nature. But we can still choose what we want to do with it. I don’t deny, there are some kodors who will attack anyone who gets in their way. But we aren’t all like that. I’ve even heard there are some who avoid fighting altogether, and try to repress the urge. But what my father did, and taught me to do, is to fight humans…selectively. To hunt for the ones who are harming others, the thieves, cutthroats, rapists, kidnappers, and to fight them.”

“You...hunt for them? You go out looking for bad people to fight, on purpose?”

“Basically, yes. Far away from here, usually. As I said the other day, I don’t want to be seen too close to my home, and my father didn’t, either. Kodors are very fast, I can go out, find a fight miles away from here, and come back again, all in a night.”

She frowned. “But you must have fought those bandits, and found me, not far from here. We talked before about whether anyone would be able to see this house from the road.”

“Yes. I wasn’t out hunting, that night—I was in bed asleep, until I heard you scream. I _prefer_ to do my fighting far away, but when someone was in danger close by, I could hardly refuse to help.”

“No, of course you couldn’t,” she said warmly. “But it makes good sense to go far away when you can. Even if the ones you fight are dead, and can’t tell anyone it was a kodor that killed them, the ones you save must see you.”

“They generally run, but yes, they see me." He smiled bitterly. "The innocent are just as afraid of me as the guilty, and who knows what stories they tell afterward? And I don’t always kill the the ones I fight. I will though, if it’s the only way to protect their victims.”

“Like me,” Karen said softly. 

“Like you,” he agreed. “Only you aren’t afraid of me.” His smile warmed.

“Whatever stories are circulating about me,” he went on, “I do my best to make sure they circulate far from here. It’s not foolproof, or you never would have heard rumors about my father so close by. But it’s the best solution I can think of. I can repress the urge to fight through the winter, when I’m snowed in up here. But to try and do it forever…I wouldn’t feel whole. That violence is a part of who I am.”

“It’s a good solution,” she said. “You’re helping people, people who have no other help. The sheriffs do their best, but outside the towns and cities, there are too many places for outlaws to hide, and not enough constables to flush all of them out. It’s _good,_ what you’re doing. And you deserve better, in return, than to have the people you save be afraid of you.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I don’t expect anything from them, that’s not why I do it. But it is hard, sometimes, knowing how much they fear me. I can hear how their hearts race, the ones who don’t simply run away. I can hear them praying to the gods to protect them. I can smell their fear, it actually changes a person’s scent. So I _know._ ”

Karen felt a mix of pity and indignation. “That isn’t fair,” she said, frowning. “You deserve better,” she repeated.

“Well, there is one thing I get in return,” he told her, “but from the ones I fight, not the victims. I suppose it’s stealing, but…I take their money, the ones I kill. So did my father. I leave it for the victims, if they haven’t run away, but usually they have. That’s how I’m able to buy supplies in human towns.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “You told me before that you buy things, I never thought about where you would get the money.” She paused, thinking about it. Yes, technically she supposed it must be considered theft. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe he was doing anything wrong.

His face had gone blank and unreadable. Was he worried that she was going to condemn him for stealing? “They probably stole it themselves, anyway,” she said firmly. “And if they didn’t, there’s no way you could know whether they’d come by it honestly or not, or who might have a rightful claim to it. Especially not if the victims have run away. I think you have a better right to it than anyone else, under the circumstances.”

His expression relaxed. “Thank you,” he said again, and got up to bring her some breakfast.

It surprised her, a little, that her opinion should matter to him. Surely he wasn’t going to change his ways, if she disapproved. But it pleased her, too. It was further evidence that she herself mattered to him, that he valued her approval.

He sat down at the table, and silence fell between them as they ate. But it was a companionable silence now, not unhappy or uncertain.The wind continued to howl outside, and when Karen looked out the window all she could see was white, the trees reduced to dark shadows veiled by the blowing snow. 

If this storm had arrived yesterday, she knew it would have depressed her spirits unutterably. But now, it didn’t trouble her. The daylight in the cabin was dim, and freezing air worked its way in around the edges of the windows, but she felt more content than she had since her mother had first told her she must marry. The future was as uncertain as ever, but the present was warm, and safe, and friendly.

After they had finished eating, Matthew went outside to bring in more firewood. He made several trips, bringing in a surplus so the wet wood would have plenty of time to dry before it was needed.

“It’s a real blizzard out there,” he told Karen. “The wind takes your breath away. I’m not going outside for anything but firewood, or snow to melt for water, as long as this lasts.”

“You must be freezing,” she said. “I’ve got all the blankets, do you want one?”

He had taken off his snow-covered jacket, and brought the chair close to the fire. “It’s warm here by the fire, I’ll be fine. What about you, did I let in too much cold air?”

It was noticeably colder now in the cabin, but she knew it would soon warm now that the door was firmly closed. “I’m fine,” she assured him.

“Good.” He smiled, and stretched out his hands toward the fire.

Once he was warm again, he turned to her and asked, “Do you think you’d like to try getting up for a while?”

“Gods, yes,” she answered eagerly. “My back aches from lying down for so long. I’d have tried it by now already, only you warned me not to sit up by myself. Do you think I’m healed enough?”

“I think we can try,” he said cautiously, coming over to the bed. “I’ll help you up, and if the pain gets worse, tell me. All right?”

“All right,” she agreed.

He slid his arm behind her shoulders once more and lifted her up, while she did her best to keep her midriff relaxed and let him bear her weight. He pulled back the covers and helped her swing her legs around and turn, until she was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“How do you feel?” he asked anxiously.

“Not bad,” she answered. “My middle aches, but not sharply the way it did at first. I don’t think I’ve torn the cut back open. Do you want to check it and make sure?”

He knelt on the floor, and she lifted her shirt out of the way while he unwound the bandage. She looked down at herself as he peeled away the folded pad of linen, and gasped as she saw her injury for the first time.

“Karen?” he said in concern.

“No, it’s fine,” she said, a little shakily. “It doesn’t hurt, it’s just…I hadn’t seen it until now. Gods, he sliced me open!” The cut was nearly the length of her forearm, red and angry-looking.

“It’s long, but not deep,” Matthew reassured her. “You turned away as he struck, so the deepest point is here, where the knife entered.” He touched her skin gently at one end of the gash. “It grows steadily more shallow, until at this end,” he touched her side, “the edges have already knit back together.”

She looked again, prepared this time for the shock, and saw that he was right. One end of the cut had healed to a thin red line. A little blood seeped from the other end, but not enough to be dangerous.

“I don’t think sitting up has done you any harm,” he decided, sounding pleased. “I can smell only a little fresh blood, and I think…” he brought his face close to the healed end. “I think this has closed a little further since last night. Good.”

Karen breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t know exactly what information he was getting from his powerful senses, but she knew she could trust his judgment.

“You seem to know quite a bit about healing,” she remarked as he re-wrapped her bandages. “I suppose you must treat your own injuries. But still, this cut can’t have been easy to heal. And you nursed me through wound-fever, as well.”

Matthew smiled, but it was a sad smile. “You can thank my father for that,” he said, getting up from the floor and sitting beside her on the bed.

“He was a healer?”

“No, not at all. At least, not at first. Kodors don’t catch human illnesses, and heal quickly from injuries, so he never needed to know much about healing for himself. But when I was a child, my mother came down with a fever. I caught it, too, being only half kodor. And my father didn’t know what to do to help us.”

He pressed his lips tightly together, his expression pained, and Karen thought she could guess what was coming next.

She was right.

“My mother died,” he said quietly. “I survived, obviously, but I was left blind.”

That, she hadn’t expected. She had never stopped to wonder if he had been born blind, or had lost his sight somehow. “I’m sorry, Matthew,” she said softly.

He sighed. “My father took it hard,” he said. “I didn’t realize it until I was older, but he blamed himself. He thought that if he had known what to do, he might have saved her. Or saved my sight.”

Karen felt a wave of sympathy for Matthew’s father, unable to save the people he loved. “Some fevers are beyond the skills of any apothecary,” she said. “Even if he had the knowledge, it might not have been enough.”

“I know,” he replied. “I certainly don’t blame him. But he was determined never to let such a thing happen again, if I ever became ill again. He…acquired…an apothecary book, and read it through, and taught me the remedies in it, too. I suppose he must have stolen it, he couldn’t visit human towns to buy things as I can. Although he might have left money behind to pay for it. I never asked. But that’s where all my knowledge of healing comes from, my father’s book. So it’s thanks to him that I knew what to do to help you.”

He fell silent, but Karen didn’t mind his silences, now that she understood he was simply unused to making conversation. Talking was something she took for granted, having grown up surrounded by people, and she hadn’t realized just what a difference it would make to live in such isolation. It was no wonder if he seemed quiet, even shy sometimes.

She smiled at him, and asked, “Well, my apothecary, do you think I can risk standing up and walking?”

“By all means, if you feel up to it,” he answered, smiling back. He helped her stand, and held her steady while she found her balance, wobbly after so many days in bed. She took a few tentative steps, clinging to his arm, gaining confidence as she grew steadier on her feet.

“The wound throbs,” she told him, “But there’s no sharp pain or tearing. It feels good to be up and moving around.”

“Good,” he said. “The throbbing is because your heart is beating more strongly, I think. As long as nothing tears, it should be all right.”

They walked back and forth across the room a few times.

“Are you warm enough?” he asked. The air in the cabin was still cool despite the fire, and Karen was wearing only a shirt and pantalettes, which left her legs bare below the knee.

“I’m cold,” she admitted, “but I don’t want to go back to bed yet.”

“No need,” he said, and walked her over to the chair by the fire. He brought a blanket, which covered her right down to her feet once it was wrapped around her and she sat down.

“Yes, that’s better,” she said with a sigh. As pleased as she was to be out of bed, she tired more quickly than she wanted to admit. It felt good to sit, wrapped snugly in her blanket. Looking around the room from this new vantage, she could see into a corner that had been hidden from her while she was in bed. And there she saw…

“Oh! Is that my bag?”

Matthew picked it up and brought it to her.

“I found it lying in the road, when I went out to move the bodies the other day,” he said. “I’m afraid the animals have been at it, they tore it open for the food inside. But I brought back what was left. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it sooner, it slipped my mind.”

She had not packed many personal belongings for her flight. But, few as they were, she felt comforted to have them back again, when she had assumed everything was lost. “Thank you,” she said, opening the torn satchel in her lap. A comb, a small eating-knife, a tinder box. A water skin, punctured now by sharp teeth. Needle and thread, scissors, a small purse of money.

She picked up the comb and smiled. “I’m glad my comb wasn’t damaged, it was a gift from my aunt,” she told him. “She lives a long way from here, near the sea, so I’ve met her only once or twice in my life. But she sent me this to celebrate my coming of age. It’s carved with sea creatures, they’re quite different from the fish that swim in our rivers.” The comb was exotic, completely unlike anything she had seen in her inland home, and she loved it.

“May I?” he asked curiously, holding out his hand, and she handed it to him. She watched his face as he ran his fingers over the carving, grinning at his disbelieving expression as he encountered a many-tentacled creature, like a group of snakes attached to a head; another with a head like a horse, but the scaly body of a fish, and a tightly curled tail; and yet another that resembled a kite, a wide flat body with a long tail training behind. There were spiral-shaped shells, as well, and branching shapes that might be either plants or animals, for all she knew.

“I didn’t believe it, either, when I first saw it,” she told him. “But I’ve been assured that those are real creatures.”

Matthew shook his head in wonder. “It’s beautiful,” he said, handing it back to her. “And beautifully carved. That’s fine work, much better than I could do.”

“Do you carve?” she asked, surprised. She had noticed he owned a set of chisels, but she could see no evidence of any works in progress anywhere in the cabin, and not much finished carving, either. There was fairly plain decorative work on some of the furniture, but that was all.

“A bit,” he said. “To pass the time. I’m generally not happy with the results, and they end up in the fire.” He made a face.

“Well, if you want a second opinion, I’d love to see your work,” she said.

He smiled, but said nothing, so she didn’t pursue the subject.

“It’s about time I combed my hair,” she said instead, pulling her long braid forward over her shoulder. “I’ve been lying on it for days, it’s a mess.” She felt along the length of it, finding plenty of hair that had pulled loose from the braid and gotten tangled. She untied the cord wrapped around the end, undid what was left of the braid, and set to work.

While she combed her hair, Matthew went to the storeroom for some dried beans and put them in a pot of water to soak. Then he went to the bed and shook out the covers, pulling them straight and fluffing up the pillows.

When Karen reached up and back with both hands to re-braid her hair, she winced and quickly dropped her arms again.

“Karen?” asked Matthew, hearing the catch in her breath.

“When I reached back, it pulled on the cut,” she explained. “I’m fine, but I don’t think I can braid my hair again. It’s too bad, it’ll get tangled much faster if it’s loose.” She sighed.

“Could I help?” he asked. “I’ve never braided hair before, but if you tell me how, I’m willing to try.”

“Oh, would you?”

He came to stand behind her chair, and she told him how to make a simple three-strand braid. His first attempt wasn’t very good, her long hair refusing to stay in the three neat sections he had divided it into.

“Here, give me the comb,” he said, undoing his work. “I can do better than that.”

She handed it to him, and he carefully combed out her hair, getting a feel for the texture of it, the way the strands slipped and shifted in his hands.

Karen closed her eyes, her scalp tingling pleasantly. It had been years since someone else had combed her hair—her mother had stopped doing it for her as soon as Karen was old enough to do it herself. Matthew’s hands were gentle, his fingers deft as they once more divided her hair into sections and began to braid, and it filled her with a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire. She felt…cared for. Safe.

A small sound of contentment vibrated in her throat, below the threshold of normal hearing, but not below Matthew’s hearing. He smiled, pleased that she seemed happy. She was like a different person today, her voice full of life, completely different from the dull, flat voice of the last two silent days. Different, too, from the exhausted, painful tones of her first days here.

Of course, it must be a relief to be out of bed, to feel less like an invalid, even if she couldn’t braid her own hair yet. But he had noticed the change in her voice as soon as she awakened, before he had even suggested she might get up.

Had their talk during the night made such a difference? Did it really mean that much to her that he liked her, and wanted to get to know her better? From the sound of her, yes, it did.

The thought brought an unfamiliar glow to his heart. No one had wanted his company since his father had died, nor had he wanted anyone else’s. But now here they were, a human woman in the home of a kodor, she humming with contentment while he braided her hair, both of them undeniably happy.

He shook his head at the sheer unlikeliness of it all, and handed the finished braid over Karen’s shoulder so she could tie her cord around the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is wondering, the cabin windows have shutters on the inside. Historically, the purpose of shutters was both to close the window, before glass windows existed, and for security, the shutters being fastened on the inside. So originally, they were on the inside of a house. 
> 
> On his own, Matthew would just keep them closed, unless he wants to open the windows for ventilation. And even with Karen there, they will always be closed after dark, so the light of the fire can't be seen from outside and draw attention.


	9. Chapter 9

The blizzard continued to rage for three days and nights. Karen still spent some of each day in bed, but every day she got up and walked around the cabin for a while, and then sat before the fire, wrapped in a blanket. Her arms were no longer bandaged, and the gash across her middle got better every day. She hadn’t yet resumed her own clothing, since a shirt was so much more practical for checking and bandaging her wound than a long dress. But Matthew lent her a pair of trousers to wear when she wasn’t in bed.

On the second day he went into the storeroom, and came back a short time later carrying a chair, which he placed at the table.

“I thought you had only one chair,” Karen said in surprise.

“I put this one in the storeroom after my father died,” he told her. “There wasn’t really any reason for me to keep it at all, but…”

“But you didn’t want to get rid of his things,” she finished sympathetically.

He nodded. “It was hard to accept, that I was all alone now,” he said quietly. “That I didn’t need two chairs anymore. Or two beds.” He sighed. “The other bed took up so much space, there really wasn’t any good reason to keep it. Or at least, I thought there wasn’t.” He flashed her a quick smile. “I moved this chair into the storeroom, and piled supplies on it. But now, if you feel up to it, we can both sit at the table for our meals.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, smiling. It was a small thing, but having a second chair in the cabin made her feel a little more like there was a place for her here. Matthew himself had made it clear she was welcome, but his solitary furniture was a silent reminder that she was occupying his place, sleeping in the only bed, sitting in the only chair. A second chair gave her a place of her own, however small, and she was glad.

Matthew stayed indoors with her while the storm lasted, only going outside to bring in more wood, or to fill the water bucket with snow to melt. They talked, telling each other about their lives, so different from each other. Karen could see now that Matthew was willing to make conversation, but as he had told her, he didn’t always know what to say. She drew him out with questions, and told him stories about her family and her town.

She wasn’t ready yet to talk much about her brother—the pain of loss was still too raw. But he inevitably came up in some of her stories, and if her breath caught and she suddenly fell silent, Matthew never pressed her to talk about it. He often took her hand in wordless sympathy, sitting beside her for as long as she needed.

Karen’s parents were sparing with physical affection, but it seemed that Matthew’s had been more demonstrative. She gathered from his stories that his father, while not quick with words, had shown his affection freely in other ways. So Matthew’s natural impulse was to reach out to her when she was distressed, especially now that he no longer felt obliged to keep her at a polite distance. It wasn’t what she was accustomed to, but she quickly found that it was exactly what she wanted, and it never failed to comfort her.

When the storm finally blew itself out, Karen woke to find the cabin filled with light. Matthew was up already, and had opened the shutters, and sunshine poured in, broken by the shadows of the nearest trees.

“Oh!” she exclaimed in pleasure, and Matthew’s head turned toward her at once.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling.

“Good morning,” she answered happily. The cabin had been dim and grey for three days, and the sight of sunlight at last was cheering. She pushed herself carefully upright—she was finally healed enough that she could sit up without help—and got out of bed to go and look out the nearest window.

She saw a small clearing, edged with tall trees, and covered in dazzling white. The snow was so deep it covered the lower part of the window.

“We’re buried!” she said in surprise. She had never seen so much snow fall before from a single storm.

“Yes,” he agreed, stirring a pot of something over the fire. “Snow falls heavily, this high up the mountain. I’ll have to go outside later, and clear what I can off the roof, and dig out the woodpile.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” she said, wanting to help, but knowing it wouldn’t be safe with a half-healed wound.

He shrugged. “It’s what I do every winter,” he said. “Just a part of living up here.” He dished out the contents of the pot into two bowls, and they sat down at the table together to eat breakfast.

After they had finished, he bundled up to go outside. “This may take a while,” he said, “so I’m afraid you’ll be on your own. But if you need anything…”

“I’ll call you,” she said with a smile. “It’s too bad I didn’t think to bring any books with me when I decided to run away. Now that I’m not sleeping half the day anymore, reading would pass the time.”

Matthew hesitated. His mother’s books were some of his most dearly valued possessions. But surely he could trust Karen, the daughter of a bookbinder, to handle them carefully. And suddenly, he found himself wondering which ones she would enjoy the most. Would her favorites be the same as his? To his own surprise, he realized he wanted to share them with her. He even felt a pang of guilt that he hadn’t offered them to her earlier, when she had still been stuck in bed with nothing to do.

“I have some books,” he told her, going to a storage chest and opening it.

“You do?” She came to stand by his side, peering over his shoulder curiously.

“They were my mother’s,” he said, lifting out the precious volumes one by one and placing them carefully on the table.

She saw his hesitancy, the way his hands lingered on each book, and understood at once how much they meant to him. Here were more things that had belonged to someone he loved, and kept even though surely they were no use to a blind man.

“Thank you, Matthew,” she said quietly. “I’ll be very careful of them, I promise. And if you want, when you’re finished outside…I could read something to you.”

A smile broke over his face, soft and surprised. Looking into his eyes, she thought she saw a momentary shimmer of bronze. “I’d like that,” he said. Then he closed the chest, got a shovel out of the storeroom, and went outside without another word.

Left alone, Karen picked up the books one by one and examined them. There were books of history and natural philosophy, similar to the ones in her parents’ house; several books of stories and a few novels; and a children’s primer and arithmetic book. She tried to imagine Matthew as a small boy, learning his letters and numbers from these books when he could still see, and smiled.

And there was the apothecary book his father had…acquired. She paged through it curiously, admiring the finely engraved illustrations of different plants, the text explaining the healing properties of each, with recipes for various tinctures and salves. A very useful book, and no doubt expensive as well—engravings like that didn’t come cheap. It must have been a sad loss to its previous owner, but she couldn’t bring herself to blame Matthew’s father if he _had_ stolen it.

She ran a professional eye over the other books. The covers were inexpensive, the thin boards covered with painted cloth rather than the embossed leather of the apothecary book. But the paper was of fairly good quality, and the bindings well-stitched and firm. The printing itself was clear and well-spaced on the page, easy to read. She approved. Books might be considered a luxury to some people, but these books were no mere display of wealth. They were meant to be read, and meant to last for generations if they were well cared-for.

They were his mother’s, Matthew had said. So she had valued them enough to bring them with her to her strange marriage, here in the middle of nowhere. Matthew’s father had kept them after she died, either out of love for her or because he, too, valued them for their own sake. Maybe both. And Matthew, in turn, had kept them after his father died, even though he was blind.

These books had value far beyond whatever price had first been paid to buy them. Karen felt touched that Matthew had offered to share them with her. She picked up _Tales and Legends from Many Lands_ , brought her chair to a sunny window, and sat down to read.

* * *

He was right—it took a long time to clear the snow from the roof, and then to clear a proper path around the cabin from the door to the woodpile. There had been no point trying to make a path during the storm, he had simply pushed his way through the accumulated snow whenever he came out to get wood.

Now, as he worked, Matthew examined the forest around him, sensing the altered movement of air currents, noting how the usual sounds and smells were muted by the fresh snow. It was deep, even among the trees where the canopy overhead blocked some of the fall. In the clearing it was so deep that, as Karen had observed, the cabin was half-buried.

Once he had cleared the woodpile, he continued his path around, making his way to each window, carefully clearing away the snow. The weight of this much snow could crack the glass, just as it could collapse the roof, if it wasn’t removed.

When he heard Karen’s heartbeat close to him, right on the other side of the wall, he realized that clearing the snow from the windows would also let in more light for her. She must have brought her chair to the window to read. How dark the last three days must have been for her, with the sun hidden by storm clouds, and the fire the only source of light inside the cabin! But she had made no complaint. He wished he had some candles, but he had stopped buying them once his father died.

He heard a light tapping on the glass, and when he lifted his head, Karen’s voice said, “Hello!”

“Hello,” he said back. “Did you need something?”

“No,” she replied, her voice muffled by the wall between them. “I just saw you there and wanted to say hello.” 

"Oh," he said, and smiled. "Hello," he repeated, and turned back to his work. He had forgotten how pleasant a simple thing like a greeting could be, how nice it was to know that someone else was here with him, and was pleased to see him.

And then, as he worked his way around to the last window, a new thought struck him. The pass over the mountain, and the roads down either side, were now buried under several feet of snow. Winter had arrived with a vengeance, and he was snowed in. Karen was going to have to stay with him until the snow melted. Until spring.

The thought should have annoyed him—a human, in his home, interrupting his solitude, for _months?_ But this wasn’t just a human, it was Karen. His dislike of humans didn't apply to her. Hadn’t, if he was being honest, ever since he had first heard her scream. And now that they were getting to know each other so much better, there was no point denying it: the idea of having her company for the whole winter, instead of just a few days, gave him a warm feeling of contentment.

But how would she feel about it? She had family, and friends, and a whole life in the town below. It was clear that she liked him, as amazing as he still found that fact. But he didn’t flatter himself that he would be an adequate substitute for everything she would be missing.

He had been standing still for several minutes while these thoughts went through his head, but now a sudden gust of wind brought his awareness back to the fact that it was bitterly cold, and the heat he had generated by his exercise was rapidly dissipating. He cleared the snow from the last window, and turned back to go inside.

* * *

When Matthew finally came back inside, he was covered in snow and shivering. Karen set aside her book, marking her place with a thread she quickly pulled from the hem of her shirt, and went to build up the fire.

“You look like the wild man-bear of the snows,” she said, thinking of the tale she had just been reading, from the far north. “Come and sit down, you must be freezing.”

Matthew beamed, distracted momentarily from what he had to tell her. “Are you reading _Tales and Legends from Many Lands?”_ he asked. “That’s one of my favorites.” He took off his snow-caked outer layers, and came to sit in front of the fire.

“It’s fascinating,” she agreed, filling a small pot with water and hanging it over the fire. “A whole world of stories. Do you suppose they’re true?”

“Who knows? I’d like to think that at least some of them are. I believed every word, when I was a child.”

“Oh, I would have, too. I would have absolutely loved this book as a child. I put some water on to heat,” she told him. “You need a hot drink. Would you like some tea?”

“I can make it myself,” he protested, starting to stand up. But she put her hands on his shoulders, holding him in place.

“Of course you can. I am offering to do it for you, because you’re cold and tired, and I’ve been idle all morning while you worked. Will you rest now, and let me make you a cup of tea?”

He sat motionless for a moment, then relaxed and sat back. “Thank you,” he said, with a small smile. “The jar with the pattern of circles around the lid, please, on the lowest shelf near the door. Will you join me?”

She found the jar, and got out a pot and two cups. The tea was a blend of mint, lemon balm, and linden flowers, a combination she had never tried until a few days ago, but was quickly coming to love. She spooned some herbs into the pot, then poured the boiling water and left the pot on the hearth to steep.

“Karen,” said Matthew, when she had brought her chair over and sat down next to him. “There’s something you need to know.”

He sounded very serious, and a curl of apprehension unfurled in her stomach. What could be wrong now?

“What is it?” she asked.

“We’re snowed in,” he answered. “You can see for yourself how deep the snow is out there. The pass over the mountain, the road…they’re completely impassable now.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Yes, of course they must be, I didn’t think. For how long?”

“Until the snow melts, Which won’t be until spring, this high up.”

She stared at him blankly. Impassable, until _spring?_

“I’m afraid you’re stuck here,” he added, when she said nothing.

She let out her breath, and found her voice. “All winter?” she asked.

“All winter,” he confirmed, his voice gentle.

She felt a curious mix of emotions. Shock, that such a possibility had never occurred to her; apprehension about being so isolated, if they needed help; a sharp stab of worry about her parents, and what they must be thinking after her and Kevin’s prolonged absence. But mixed with it all was a sense of relief, as if a burden had been lifted from her.

“Oh,” she said again, turning to look into the fire. She had been trying not to think about the future, ever since she had made up her mind to run away. Now it was suddenly out of her hands, for the next few months at least, and she couldn’t help feeling thankful. But there was also relief in the thought that she would be spending more time with Matthew.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t sound upset. Rather, he sounded like he expected _her_ to be upset, and was trying to break it to her gently. She looked at his face, saw the look of suspense there, and realized abruptly that he would have no idea what she was thinking unless she said something more meaningful.

“It’s all right,” she said hurriedly. “I just…it’s a shock, I never expected…but it’s not a bad shock.”

“It’s not?” he sounded surprised, and…hopeful?

“No,” she said firmly. She went to fetch the wire strainer and strained the pot of tea into the cups, marshaling her thoughts into some kind of order.

“Do we have enough food?” she asked, handing him a cup and sitting back down.

“Yes,” he assured her. “What I have stored might not be quite enough on its own, for two of us, but we’ll have fresh meat, as well. I’ll have to set my snares closer to the house with the snow so deep, but there’s never been a winter yet when I couldn’t catch anything. There’s no need to worry.”

“Good. That was my biggest concern.” She knew there would be other dangers in a winter spent in the wild, and their isolation still made her uneasy. But Matthew had always lived here, and presumably knew how to cope with whatever might happen. She was simply going to have to trust him.

“Do you mind having me here for so long?” she asked next, a little hesitantly. “You’ve been nothing but kind to me, and I feel like we’re friends now, and I’m glad of it. But you also thought that I’d be off your hands in a few more days. Are you…are you upset?” Not that either of them could change matters, if he was. But she couldn’t help wanting to know.

“No, not at all,” he said, so earnestly that she couldn’t help but believe him. “I’m glad you’re here, truly, I’m not just making the best of it because it’s unavoidable. But what about you? Are you really not upset about having to stay so long?”

“I’m upset that my parents will have to go until spring without knowing what happened to me…to us,” she admitted, with a sigh. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. Being stuck up here all alone would upset me, but being here with you doesn’t.”

He could hear her heart beating, calm and steady, and knew it was the truth. He smiled, relieved, and they sat together in silence, drinking their tea.

Then Karen had a new thought. “Why, by spring…” she said, “Surely Mr. Wesley will have found a wife by then.” She had told Matthew the full story of her proposed engagement during the blizzard, and all of the reasons that had brought it about. “I shouldn’t need to go to the temple at all, I can simply go home!”

Though it wouldn’t be simple, of course. No doubt her parents would be relieved that she wasn’t dead, but they were bound to be angry at her defiance. And she would have to tell them what had happened to Kevin…

Another realization fell into place.

“Kevin is dead,” she said slowly. “He will never bring home a wife to live in our house. That means I’ll never need to marry at all, if I don’t want to. In fact…” she stopped, feeling the blood drain from her face.

Matthew heard her breathing change, and heard the rise in her heart rate. “What is it?” he asked quietly, reaching for her hand.

“I’m my father’s heir, now that Kevin is dead,” she said. Her hand was cold, and trembled in his. “I’ll inherit the shop, when my father is gone.”

There had been a time when she had thought it was unfair that Kevin should get the shop, and not her, just because he was older. She knew the business just as well as he did, and understood every bit of the bookbinder’s craft. But now…

“I don’t want it,” she whispered. Guilt swept over her, that something she had once wanted would now be hers, after all. “Not like this. I did want it, once, but I’m only getting it because he’s dead.” She felt sick. She wanted no inheritance that was purchased with her brother’s blood—especially not when his death was her fault. She would feel no better than a thief, if she took what rightfully belonged to him. She clung to Matthew’s hand, shaking her head. “I don’t want it,” she repeated in distress.

He moved his chair closer, setting his cup down so he could hold her hand in both of his.

“You don’t have to take it, if you don’t want to,” he said quietly. He didn’t know much about human inheritance laws, but surely no-one could make her take over a business if she didn’t want it. And she was speaking now out of shock, and grief. She might feel very differently by the time her father actually died. “You don’t have to do anything, right now.”

He wished, as he had before, that there was something more he could do than just sit by her and hold her hand. But it seemed to help—her trembling stilled after a while, and her hand grew warmer.

“You’re right,” she said, and her voice sounded less strained. “There’s nothing I could do right now, even if I wanted to.” She sighed. “I never thought beyond taking sanctuary in the temple, when I started all this,” she told him. “I didn’t know what would happen after that. I knew my parents would be angry with me. If things had gone according to plan, Kevin would have taken my side, once he went back home. He would have defended my decision, and tried to convince them to forgive me. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now, everything is changed.”

She turned her hand in his clasp, lacing her fingers through his. “I’m glad I don’t have to face my future yet,” she said. “I don’t know what I want. When I try to look ahead, all I see is uncertainty. But here…” she looked around the cabin. “Here, I feel peaceful.”

The words felt inadequate, but she didn’t know how to express her feelings any better. Between the violence of the recent past, and the blank unknown of the future, the present was an oasis of calm, a sanctuary as necessary as the one she had sought in the temple. If she had looked a little deeper, she might have seen that it was Matthew himself, and not his house, that brought her peace. But since the two came together, it didn’t much matter. _Here_ meant the same thing as _with him._

“I know hiding from my problems isn’t the answer,” she said. “But I am truly glad I can stay here a while longer.”

“So am I,” he answered. “I’m glad you find it peaceful, I was afraid you’d be lonely. Don’t think of it as hiding, you deserve some peace after everything that’s happened. And you don’t have to figure out the rest of your life all at once. No-one knows the future. Maybe by spring, you’ll have a better idea of what you want.”

“Maybe,” she answered. 

* * * * *

In the town of Fagan Corners, Thomas Chandler went to visit John the blacksmith for a private talk.

“A stranger passed though town last week,” he said. “Told the whole tavern there’s a kodor on the mountain.”

The smith nodded. “I heard about it from young Martin, Robert Mason’s ‘prentice. He thought the man was just drunk. Are you thinking there’s more to it than that?”

“I think the man was scared right down to his bones, whatever caused it. I’ve been thinking it over, and I wanted to ask you something, since you talked to those men a few years ago who said they’d killed the kodor. Did they ever say whether they’d found the creature’s den?”

“Not that I recall,” answered the smith, looking troubled. “Are you suggesting there’s more than one? I always heard tell kodors live alone.”

The chandler shrugged. “They must have to mate, unless you think they just spring from the earth fully-formed. Could be our kodor had a mate. Or young. Without finding its den, how could they be sure?”

John looked grim. “What do you want to do about it, then? Tell the town?”

Thomas shook his head. “There’s no point in spreading alarm. The mountain road’s buried after that blizzard. If there is a kodor up there, it’s snowed in. But come the spring, it wouldn’t do any harm for a group of strong lads to quietly go up and have a look around. You went up to see the spot, after the old one was killed. Do you think you can find the place again?”

“Maybe,” he answered doubtfully. “I remember it was near the top, at least. You think its den was close by?”

“I think it’s a good place to start. No-one ever leaves the road that high up, there could be anything hidden in those woods. What do you say?”

The smith nodded decisively. “If there is another one, it’ll have to be dealt with. I tell you, Tom, I never really believed in the old one, until I talked with the ones who killed it. And when I went up to see the place, I don’t mind admitting I was spooked. No body to be seen, and the ground all scorched and burned black. But only in that one spot—and you know as well as I do that any natural fire would have spread into the trees. It looked like hell itself had opened to take back its own. I believe now, all right.”

“I’m the same,” said the chandler. “I never believed, until the beast was dead. But now, if there’s another one…and there may not be, who knows what that stranger really saw? No one else in the tavern took it seriously. But if it’s true…I don’t propose to spread the story too widely, and maybe frighten people to no purpose. But we have all winter to ask around, quietly, and see if we can find a few more who think as we do.”

The smith agreed. “And once the snows melt and the road is clear, we can find ourselves some hellbane, and go up there and see what’s what. You can count on me, Tom. I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm giving the townspeople last names that come from their professions. A chandler is a candle-maker. People I lifted from the show have their own last names, of course, although some of those names could also be professions. The reason I first decided Karen's father should be a bookbinder is because his last name is Page, but I do think it's also an appropriate trade for Karen to know just for its own sake. I'm not going to force any character into an inappropriate profession just because of their name.
> 
> Going by her name, the obvious profession for Claire Temple would be priestess, but I really wanted her to be the midwife, to keep her in the medical profession. Maybe one of her parents was in the priesthood, or maybe she used to be, but changed jobs for some reason.
> 
> Regarding Matthew's books, natural philosophy just means knowledge of the natural world, and not Philosophy as we use the term today. It's basically a science book. I like the idea that in this world, the science of the day would be an expected subject for an educated person to know, and natural philosophy books are as common in personal libraries as history books.


	10. Chapter 10

Now that Karen knew she would be staying with Matthew all winter, she insisted on helping him with the chores.

“But you’re my guest,” he objected. “I can’t put you to work.”

“It isn’t fair for you to do all the work yourself, you know it isn’t,” she countered. “I’m going to be here for months, and you can’t tell me that cooking and cleaning for two isn’t any more work than one. Let me help.”

He still looked unconvinced, so she added, “I don’t want to be idle while you work, I wouldn’t feel right. And besides…” She hesitated. She knew that if she brought up how much had already done for her, how much she owed him, he would brush it off. Instead, she said, “This is your home. Not mine. I know that. But while I’m here, I would like to be able to feel that I _belong._ I would rather be a…a resident, than a guest, do you see? You’ve been such a kind host, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. But if I can begin to do my fair share of the work, I’ll feel that I truly have a place here of my own.”

There was no way he could argue with that, and so Karen began to help with the daily chores. He insisted that she not set foot outside until her injury was completely healed, so at first only he could go out to clear fresh falls of snow from around the cabin, gather wood in the forest, and set his snares for small game. But she knew all about the messy business of skinning and gutting the animals he brought back, and could share in the other indoor tasks of cooking, cleaning, tending the fire, sharpening tools, and anything else that needed doing.

When she was finally healed enough to take off his shirt and trousers and resume her own clothes, she was impressed by the fine work he had done mending the tears in her gown and shifts.

“I can hardly tell they were ever torn,” she marveled. “You sew beautifully.”

He turned pink at the unaccustomed praise. “I had to tear strips from one shift,” he said apologetically, “On that night, before I brought you home. To bind up your injuries.”

She felt a shiver of dread recalling the fight, but quickly shook it off. “Luckily, I was wearing extra layers for warmth, so I have spares,” she said lightly.

She could still see a faint shadow of the blood that had stained the fabric, but that was only to be expected. Despite that grim reminder, she was pleased to be dressed in her own clothes once again. A shirt and trousers might be comfortable, but she felt a little less beholden to Matthew once she was no longer wearing his clothes.

As soon as she was fully healed, and could go outside, she asked Matthew to show her where her brother was buried.

He went out first with the shovel, widening the path the path he had already made around the cabin, and clearing it of the most recent fall of snow. Then he came back inside and exchanged his jacket for a warm cloak that covered him past the knee. Karen had put on her extra shifts, dressing herself warmly in all the layers she had worn when she first ran away, and she put on her own cloak and followed him outside.

The day was calm and clear, and very cold. The deep snow in the clearing shone so brightly in the sun that it was hard to look at until her eyes adjusted, after so long spent indoors. Matthew led her around the cabin to the far corner, and stopped.

“He’s here, next to my parents,” he told her. “There’s a stone marking my mother’s grave, but of course it’s covered up now. Father buried her here, near the house, so she would always be close to us.” He felt a lump in his throat, even after all these years, and willed his eyes not to tear up. In this cold, tears would freeze into ice right on his skin.

“When he died, I buried him beside her,” he went on. “And when I brought your brother back, I put him next to them.” He indicated the spot. He felt that there should be something more to say, but he didn’t know what.

Karen moved past him, leaving the path and taking a few floundering steps into the deep snow to get closer to the grave. Matthew hung back, not wanting to intrude, but not wanting to leave her alone out here, either. She stood very still, not speaking, and he listened to the steady thump of her heartbeat and said nothing.

Karen tried to remember the words of the burial prayer, tried to tell herself that Kevin was at peace now. But standing here, confronting at last the place where he lay buried, all she could think of was the terrible moment when bandits had burst out of the trees on either side of the road, and he had barely had time to draw his knife to defend himself before his throat was cut.

His violent final moments, that she had tried so hard not to think about, now marched relentlessly through her head. She stopped fighting it, and let the pain wash over her.

“Kevin,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” There was snow under her skirts, her body was beginning to shiver from the cold, but she hardly noticed. Grief and horror and guilt were building up inside her, squeezing her heart with a grip like iron. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, knowing there would never be an answer, either to condemn or to forgive, but needing to say it anyway.

Matthew stood in silence behind her, filled with sympathy that he didn’t know how to express. It was obvious she still blamed herself for her brother’s death, and he felt helpless to ease the burden she struggled to bear. But as time went on, and they both grew colder, he finally spoke.

“Come inside, Karen,” he said, as gently as he could. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and get warm.”

“You go in,” she told him. “There’s no reason for you to stand out here and suffer.”

If he did that, there was no telling how much longer she would stand here, mired in snow, ignoring the cold. That would never do. Well, if he couldn’t convince her to come in, he could at least stay with her and keep her from freezing.

He stepped forward until he stood behind her, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, drawing his cloak around them both. “I’m not leaving you out here all by yourself,” he said, “Punishing yourself for something that isn’t your fault.”

“But it is!” she cried, and suddenly tears filled her eyes and she began to cry, as if stating her guilt out loud had pulled a tight cork from a bottle and released a torrent. She clung to his arms, sobbing, her whole body shaking, unable to speak. The sudden force of the outburst frightened her a little, but it also seemed to ease the terrible pressure in her heart.

She felt his arms tighten around her, his chest pressing against her back, and leaned against him gratefully. He didn’t try to tell her she was wrong, he just stood at her back in silent support, as strong and solidly rooted as a tree.

After a while, the torrent eased. And then she tried to blink her eyes open, found she couldn’t, and realized her tears had frozen her eyes closed. 

“My eyes!” she cried, frightened, but as she raised her hands to her face Mathew caught her wrists.

“Don’t rub them,” he warned her. “The ice will cut your eyelids. Come inside now, and let it melt.”

Shaken out of her terrible thoughts, she turned obediently, aware once more of the bitter cold and its dangers. She stumbled in the deep snow, her legs numb, unable to see, but Matthew kept an arm around her and guided her back to the path.

They were both shivering as they made their way to the cabin door, and once they were inside Matthew led Karen straight to the fire. He rubbed his hands briskly together, the friction warming his palms, then cupped them gently over her eyes. He felt the ice trapped in her lashes change back to water, helped by the fresh tears still leaking from her eyes. He brushed his fingers delicately over her cheeks, making sure no ice remained, then said softly, “Open your eyes.”

She did so, and took a relieved, shuddering breath.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice catching on a small sob. She couldn’t seem to stop crying, but it was quieter now, more subdued.

“You’re welcome,” he answered, his hand cupping her cheek for a moment. Then he turned away to add more wood to the fire.

She shook the snow out of her skirts, and then stood still, overcome by weariness. She knew that he must be as cold as she was, and felt that she should help him, as he brought both chairs to the fire, put water on to heat, and got out cups and the jar of tea. But before she could bring herself to move, he was finished.

He had exchanged his cloak for a blanket, and brought another for her. She shed her damp cloak gratefully, he wrapped the blanket around her, and they both finally sat down.

Neither one said anything as they waited for the water to boil, and then for the tea to steep. Karen’s tears gradually eased, and her body began to warm as she sipped her tea, but she felt drained and terribly sad.

Kevin’s death was no longer something she could avoid thinking about. It was a physical fact, his body lying in the earth mere feet away on the other side of that wall, and she could no longer hide from her guilt over the role she had played in causing it.

And then, beside her, Matthew began to speak.

“When my father died,” he said, “When I came home and found his body, I blamed myself for not being here.”

She looked at him sharply, and nearly said _That’s not the same thing,_ but stopped herself. His face was full of remembered pain, and she knew that his grief was just as strong as hers even if the circumstances were different.

He continued, “I knew it was unreasonable. I knew that if I had been here, they would have killed me, too. They had hellbane. The touch of it burns us like fire, and piercing our skin with it poisons us. It isn’t like fighting against ordinary weapons, all it takes is a _twig_ to kill us. I couldn’t have stood against it any more than he could. I _know_ that. But all I could _feel_ was that he needed help, and I wasn’t here. I should have fought beside him, I should have defended him, even if I failed and we both died.”

He had begun quietly, but his voice grew more emotional as he went on, and Karen realized with a dart of startled pity that of course, he had never had anyone to talk to about this. He had never had anyone, period, once his father was dead.

“He needed me, and I was halfway across the country…shopping.” His tone dripped with self-contempt. “Pretending to be human, while humans murdered him. I should have been here.”

His voice broke, and she saw the shine of tears in his eyes. She slid her chair closer to his, and took his hand.

He looked surprised, and gave a wet little laugh. “I thought _I_ was supposed to be comforting _you,_ ” he said ruefully.

“Who says you aren’t?” she replied. It had never occurred to her that he might feel guilt over his father’s death, and it _was_ a comfort, albeit a sad one, to know that he understood her own feelings so fully.

He smiled, and sighed. “The point I was trying to make is that I know what it’s like to feel guilty for something that isn’t actually your fault. My father’s death is the fault of the people who killed him, and no-one else, no matter how guilty I feel. So is your brother’s.”

“But if I hadn’t decided to run away, we never would have been on that road that night to be attacked,” she objected.

“I was his own choice to come with you,” he answered. “You didn’t ask him, you would have gone alone if he hadn’t offered.” _And met the bandits all by yourself,_ he thought, and shuddered.

“And what drove you to run away?” he went on. “Your brother wanted to marry, Mr. Wesley’s wife died, your parents refused to listen to you. Your town has no temple. Change any one of those facts, and you wouldn’t have needed to run. A whole chain of circumstances led to Kevin’s death. I understand how you feel, believe me. But don’t try to carry the weight of the entire chain, when your decision is only a single link.”

She looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t trying to deny her feelings, or to convince her that she was wrong to feel responsible; he was only putting her responsibility in perspective, and trying to stop her from taking on more blame than she deserved.

A small thread of relief wound its way into her heart, easing the burden of guilt. She knew that she would always blame herself for Kevin’s death, but she also knew that Matthew was right—it wasn’t entirely her fault. She moved her chair still closer to his, until they touched, and leaned her head on his shoulder, his hand firmly clasped in hers.

“I’m so glad you saved me that night, and brought me back here,” she said quietly. “For so many reasons.”

“So am I,” he whispered.

And then they sat together in silence, listening to the crackle of the fire.


	11. Chapter 11

After that, thinking about Kevin, and talking about him, became easier to bear. As the days went by, Karen told Matthew more about him, and he reciprocated with stories about his father. They both found an unexpected relief in talking about their loved ones to someone who understood their sometimes painful feelings, their losses bringing them closer together in mutual sympathy.

They were comfortable with each other now, at ease either in conversation or in silence, working together companionably. Each day had its share of chores that needed to be done, and now that Karen was fully healed she could help with all of them. 

It snowed often, sometimes howling down in fierce storms, sometimes drifting down silently to blanket the mountain, and Karen and Matthew took turns shoveling the snow around the cabin. She also began to come with him sometimes when he gathered wood and checked his snares, eager to see the forest now that she could finally go outside. It was frequently hard going, pushing through underbrush buried in snow, but it felt good to be so active, and it gave her a new respect for his strength. And Matthew enjoyed the company, and admitted to himself that it was nice to have help instead of having to do everything himself.

Indoors, they shared the housework between them, and some days Karen read out loud, as she had promised. Matthew admitted to her that he could, in fact, read his mother’s books himself, but he still liked to hear her read to him.

“We’re sharing them this way, it’s like we’re reading them together,” he said, smiling.

Another, private reason was that he simply liked the sound of her voice—just as her private reason for being so willing was that she liked to see him smile. 

The days passed quickly, the time never seeming to hang heavy on their hands. And when they went to bed each night, Karen still slept in Matthew’s bed, despite her protests.

“I’m fully recovered now, I can sleep on the floor just as well as you can,” she insisted. “It’s not fair for you to always have to do it.”

But he simply turned around on her the argument she had used over the housework. “If I take the bed, and make you sleep on the floor, I’d feel like I was treating you as if you don’t belong here,” he said, all wide-eyed earnestness. And he remained immovable, no matter what she said, revealing a stubborn streak the equal of her own.

However, he didn’t particularly want to spend all winter sleeping on the floor, either. So one day he took his axe into the forest, and searched until he found a couple of long, straight saplings, and a young ash tree that could be split into thin, flexible slats. He brought his finds home and cut them to the lengths he wanted outside, then brought them into the cabin.

He made the saplings into a rectangular framework, held up off the floor on short legs, and wrapped the ash slats around the frame, weaving them together across the empty middle to make a springy platform he could lie on comfortably.

Karen watched him work with interest. Here was another skill she hadn’t known he possessed. She knew that living alone must require him to have some knowledge of many crafts, but she was still impressed as she saw the simple, low bed take shape before her eyes.

“There,” he said with satisfaction, when it was finished. “Now neither of us has to sleep on the floor.”

“But you still aren’t going to sleep in your own bed, and let me sleep on that one, are you?”

“No,” he said, grinning.

She admitted defeat, now that she knew at least he would be comfortable. And the sight of that mischievous little smile was almost worth losing the argument.

The better she got to know him, the more convinced she became that his serious demeanor was the result of losing his family, and spending so much time alone, more than it was natural temperament. Now that he had her for company, he was gradually opening up, becoming more talkative, even showing occasional signs of playfulness. She was liking him more and more as time went on, whether serious or playful, but she loved to see him happy, and she was secretly delighted whenever she made him smile.

Matthew wasn’t like anyone else she had ever met, but the differences between them, as well as the similarities, seemed to fit together like the dove-tails of a well-made cabinet joint. Her heart had been sore and lonely when they first met, but now she accepted him into those lonely places inside herself without hesitation, as if he belonged there.

For his part, Matthew was pleased to see Karen recovering somewhat from her grief and guilt, and becoming happier. He didn’t realize how much of her happiness was because of him, as he didn’t consider himself to be very good company. But he was liking her more and more, too, and he was glad she was in better sprits these days, and even more glad that they were getting along so well.

He had never had a friend—had never even considered the possibility that he might want one. All his life, he had known that getting to close to any of the humans he met would be dangerous. But now circumstances had brought Karen Page into his life, a human who knew what he was and liked him anyway, and he turned toward the warmth of her affection as naturally as a flower turns toward the sun. He didn’t question his own feelings, even though such a thing had never happened to him before. He knew he was happier than he had been in years, and that was enough.

* * *

One morning, after she had lived with Matthew for several weeks, Karen said, “We must be near the winter solstice. Has it passed yet, do you think?”

Matthew thought about it. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I don’t really keep track of the date.” He knew humans celebrated the summer and winter solstices, but he hadn’t paid much attention to them in years.

But of course, Karen would. “It didn’t occur to me you might want to celebrate it, I’m sorry. Did you want to do something?”

“Do kodors celebrate the solstice?” she asked curiously.

“Not generally, no. But my parents and I used to, when my mother was alive. After she died, my father and I kept it up for a few years, just the two of us, but as I got older I could see his heart wasn’t really in it without her. I didn’t want him to think he had to keep making the effort for my sake, so after a while we stopped.” He asked again, “Do you want to do something to celebrate?”

Karen wasn’t sure. “I’ve never spent a solstice away from my family before,”’ she said thoughtfully. 

All over the country, on the longest night of the year people would build bonfires to drive back the dark and the cold. The fires would be kept burning all night, and people would gather around them, whole towns together, making wishes for the coming year, and singing. Those who could afford to would make special holiday foods to share with everyone at the fires, and the celebration would go on until morning, for those who had the energy to stay up that long.

“Celebrating the holiday without them might just make me miss them more,” she said, considering. “But now that I’m thinking about it, doing nothing doesn’t seem right, either. If I just ignore the day, that’s like pretending it isn’t happening, and that won’t make me feel any better. Yes, I’d like to do something to celebrate it with you, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind a bit.” Now that she had brought it up, Matthew realized he was looking forward to the idea. “It won’t be much, but we can build a fire outside. Just a small one, not like the big bonfires my mother used to tell me about.” It wouldn’t be the same as when he was a child, but then it wouldn’t be the same for Karen, either. It would be something new, that the two of them would make together.

“I don’t have any ink for writing wishes, though,” he added apologetically. It was traditional to write wishes on bits of paper, scraps of cloth, even dried leaves, anything that would burn, and add them to the bonfires so the words could be carried to the gods in the smoke.

“That’s all right,” said Karen. “I don’t need wishes.” The one thing she wanted above all—for Kevin not to have died—she knew that no god was going to grant her. “We can’t make the holiday foods, either. But the fire is really the most important part. Light, made by us, to push back the darkness.”

She remembered belatedly that for him, it was always dark. But he smiled.

“And warmth to push back the cold,” he agreed. “And company. I never felt much like doing it all by myself.”

“And company, of course,” she replied, with an answering smile. “I’ve lost track of my days since I’ve been here. If you aren’t sure of the date, either, when should we do it?”

“Why not tonight?” he replied. “It isn’t going to snow, and all the preparation we need is a clear patch of ground to build the fire on.”

“Tonight, then,” she agreed. It might not be a large celebration, or an elaborate one. But the idea of sitting up late, by an outdoor fire, had an excitement of its own. She looked forward to sharing the experience with Matthew, even if they just sat together and talked as they would indoors.

After they had eaten lunch, Matthew went outside with the shovel to clear a patch of ground in the clearing. Karen couldn’t help him, since there was only one shovel, but she brought several armfuls of wood inside and spread them out on the hearth to dry. They were going to need enough usable wood for the outdoor fire, without shortchanging the one indoors that kept the cabin warm.

There was nothing they could do to make their dinner any more festive than usual—all they had to work with was Matthew’s store of root vegetables, dried beans, and dried meat, and whatever fresh meat he could catch in the forest. But neither of them minded that, and they were both in such good spirits that it was a happy meal.

After dark, they both carried armfuls of wood outside. Matthew arranged the logs and the smaller kindling in a careful pile, while Karen went back inside to bring a burning stick from the fireplace to light it.

Once the fire was burning well, they brought out chairs and blankets, so they could sit in comfort. The pushed the chairs together, and huddled close in their blankets, shoulders pressed together.

Karen looked up at the sky above them, and caught her breath in wonder. “Oh, Matt!” she breathed, the nickname slipping out without thinking. “It’s beautiful!”

Beside her, he stilled for an instant.

“Matthew?” she asked uncertainly. “Is it all right if I call you Matt, or would you rather I didn’t?”

He smiled. “It’s all right. It just surprised me. No-one’s called me Matt since my father died, that’s what my parents called me. Whenever strangers ask my name, I say Matthew. But you can call me Matt. I like it.” Only the people he was closest to had ever called him Matt, and although hearing it from Karen had startled him, it also gave him a warm, pleased feeling inside.

“All right, I will,” she said softly. It might seem like a small thing, but they had already learned the hard way how names could keep each other at a distance. Now, by welcoming the nickname, she felt that he was inviting her to come closer. If her own name had a short form, she would have gladly returned the gesture. She smiled and relaxed, and turned her attention back to the sky.

“I used to love the night sky,” he said, a little wistfully. “How does it look?”

“Oh, it’s full of stars,” she answered. “It’s a perfectly clear night, and there’s no moon. Just stars everywhere. I don’t think I’ve even seen so many. Or maybe it’s just that I’m seeing them framed by trees, instead of houses. It’s beautiful, we couldn’t have picked a better night.”

Matthew tipped his face up to the sky. His powerful senses allowed him to perceive many things, but he had lost the stars forever when he lost his sight. “I’m glad,” he said. “When I was a child, I always hoped the solstice would be on a starry night. I remember the sparks from the fire would float up into the sky and disappear in the stars, I loved to watch them.”

Karen obligingly described to him how the fire looked, sending up sparks that glowed as they rose, until the glow from the stars above swallowed them. She told him how the trees around the clearing looked, silhouetted against the sky, and how the snow shone in the starlight.

She did not describe for him the way his own face looked beside her, firelight and starlight gilding his skin, his expression open and unguarded. 

And he said nothing about how soft and intimate her voice became as she talked, transforming what he couldn’t see into beauty he could hear.

After a while she began to sing quietly, a traditional solstice carol that he hadn’t heard since his mother died, and he caught his breath at the sudden rush of emotion that flooded him.

Karen hadn’t been looking at him, feeling a little shy about singing in front of him, but she felt his slight start and her voice faltered as she turned and saw his expression.

He smiled in quick reassurance. “Don’t stop, please,” he said. “My mother used to sing that one.”

_Oh._ She certainly hadn’t intended to remind him of his dead mother, but he didn’t seem upset. And he had just asked her not to stop. “Sing it with me then, since you know it,” she suggested, and began again. 

At first he just sat and listened. It had been a long time, and he wasn’t sure he remembered the words. But they came back to him as Karen sang, and after the second verse she nudged his shoulder meaningfully, so he hesitantly joined in on the chorus. Her voice brightened, and she felt under his blanket for his hand and clasped it warmly.

They sang more carols, Matthew surprising himself by just how many he could remember once he tried. As much as he enjoyed listening to Karen, it was a pleasure of a different kind to sing along with her, sharing the familiar music between them. He could remember singing with childish gusto when he was young, but now they sang softly, neither of them wanting to disrupt the peaceful night with loud voices. 

Karen was accustomed to large, busy solstice gatherings, noisy with dozens of people all together, but she didn’t feel there was anything lacking in this small, quiet celebration. Matt, of course, was used to the solstice celebration being small, but he hadn’t had such a happy one since his mother died. 

Hand in hand, huddled close together under their blankets, the two of them had created an island of shared warmth that went deeper than the physical warmth of the fire. The smallness of it, and the quiet, just made it seem more personal.

The winter solstice was a time for looking ahead, to the new year, to the return of spring, but on this night they both wrapped themselves in the present, and were content. Neither of them wanted to look ahead to anything else but what they had right now.

* * *

As the winter went on, and they got to know each other better and better, Matt found his old interest in humans was beginning to revive somewhat. It wasn’t the same fascination he had felt before his father died, but he was genuinely curious to hear about Karen’s life in Fagan Corners. And he told her about some of the towns he had visited over the years, asking her questions about various human customs that had puzzled him.

“Pretending to be human is more than just wearing a hat and covering my eyes,” he told her. “I also have to be careful not to reveal just how much I don’t know, if I want to go unnoticed. Being blind makes me memorable enough already, without being ignorant of things everybody knows.”

“Why do you need a hat to pass for human?” she asked curiously. She remembered now that he had mentioned the fact once before, but at the time she had been too distracted to ask. “The eyes I understand, you can’t risk them glowing around other people. But the hat?”

“You can’t see them?” he asked.

“See what?”

In answer, he knelt down on the floor so she could see the top of his head, and parted his hair with his fingers, revealing the small nubs of his horns.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Goodness. I thought they just…went away, when they weren’t full-sized.”

“Not entirely,” he said. “This is as small as they get.”

“I never noticed them until now,” she said. “Your hair covers them.”

“Usually, yes,” he agreed, “unless it gets flattened down on my head. One unexpected rainfall, and my secret’s out. So I always wear a hat when I go out among humans.”

She thought of the likely reaction in any town to a man with horns, and shivered. What must it be like, to have to be so careful, so constantly on guard against the people around him? No wonder kodors were solitary—only when he was alone could he be what he was, without fear.

And now, with her. She remembered his consternation, after her fever broke, when he realized that she had recognized him. He must have been expecting her to be terrified. She was glad, for his sake as well as her own, that he now trusted her enough to show her his horns and tell her what he had to do to hide them. And she would gladly do whatever she could to help him safely pass for human.

She took his hand, and drew him back up to his feet. “Well,” she said, “You’ve got a human on your side now. I’ll tell you whatever I can about human customs, ask me anything you like.”

He smiled, and squeezed her hand gently before releasing it. _A human on his side._ Not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable. But the idea was rapidly becoming less astonishing, and more pleasing, as time went on.

The days passed pleasantly, and in the evenings, if there was no more work that needed doing, Matt took up his carving once more. He made whatever took his fancy, shaping small animals, or flowers, or repeating patterns that would make pretty borders if they were carved onto pieces of furniture, instead of scraps of firewood.

He was a little shy of working in front of Karen at first, since he didn’t think he was very good. But she disagreed, and told him so. Her praise both pleased him and embarrassed him. He honestly didn’t think his skill was anything remarkable, but he couldn’t help the warm glow it gave him knowing that she did. 

She thought it was a shame that his efforts ended up in the fire, but he pointed out that he didn’t have room for a lot of useless objects. He carved to pass the time, and to improve his skills, not to amass a collection of finished pieces. But she was able to persuade him to keep a few that she particularly liked.

He attempted to copy the sea-creatures on her comb, but made a face at the result and tossed his work in the fire with the rest. But he tried it again a few days later, and again, and even he had to admit that he got better with practice.

Karen got so interested that she tried her hand at it herself, but without much success. Her first efforts made her groan and snicker, and she threw them into the fire.

“Now you know how I feel about mine,” said Matt.

“But yours are so much better!” she protested.

“When I was just starting out, I’ll bet my first attempts weren’t any better than yours.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know what sort of hideous misshapen blob of nothing I just put in the fire.”

“Show me your next one, then, before you burn it,” he challenged her. “You get to see everything I make, whether I think it’s any good or not. So play fair, show me yours.”

“All right, I will,” she said. She didn’t particularly want to, she had been glad he couldn’t tell just how bad she was. But he was right, it was only fair.

She picked up her chisel and a fresh piece of wood. Knowing that she would be showing him the result, she tried her very best to make something recognizable. But the wood itself seemed to work against her efforts, knotholes and irregularities defeating her attempts to shape it as she wanted. It was frustrating, but she couldn’t help laughing at the warped object she produced.

“I give up. Here, I’ve made another blob.” She handed it to Matt, who accepted it with a smile, and then turned thoughtful as he ran his fingers over the surface. She watched his face while she waited for his judgement, but it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

“Karen,” he said at last, “This is a very good carving of…a rock. If you were trying to make something else…” His serious expression cracked into a grin.

“Give me that!” she exclaimed, taking it back and tossing it in the fire. “I _told_ you I was bad.”

“You’ll get better,” he said, serious now, though he was still smiling. “I carved lots of rocks when I was first learning.”

He took her hands, feeling fine tremors in the muscles that she might not even be aware of. She must have been gripping her tools tightly, fighting the toughness of the wood, determined to do well. “You’ll get better,” he repeated, massaging her palms with his thumbs.

“I could hardly get worse,” she grumbled, but she smiled as she said it. It was nice to know he didn’t think she was hopeless, and his thumbs were unerringly finding the sore spots in her hands. She had been so focused on her work that she hadn’t noticed how her hands were aching until she set down her tools.

Neither one of them gave a thought to the intimacy of their position, sitting close, their legs touching, his hands holding hers as his thumbs stroked over the sensitive skin of her palms. By now it had come to seem perfectly natural to both of them to reach out to each other and touch. Casually, lightly, never anything that passed the bounds of friendship. But within those bounds they had drawn steadily closer day by day, both of them warmed and contented by the contact, neither of them questioning it.

And so the winter passed, until the inevitable approach of spring.


	12. Chapter 12

Winters were hard up here on the mountain, and Matt looked forward to spring every year. Even when he had been at his most sad and bitter, the first year after his father died, he had still welcomed the warmth in the air, the smells of new growth, the singing of the birds.

He could feel the first signs of the change of season as he gathered wood in the forest, working alone today while Karen stayed home to do some necessary mending. Matt thought happily that this year, he could share all the beauties of the coming spring with her—and abruptly, his happiness faded. 

Karen was going to leave, as soon as the road was clear of snow. He had always known she would leave when spring came, but he had avoided thinking about it so successfully that for a moment he had forgotten.

Karen would leave, and he would be left all alone once more. He had told himself often in the last two years that kodors were meant to be solitary, but now the thought gave him no comfort. Kodor or not, he knew with sudden, painful certainty that he did not want her to leave. He had hardly noticed the gradual, stealthy steps that had drawn them closer together all through the winter, and made her company so dear to him. But now, knowing that he was about to lose her made the truth mercilessly clear.

He had no right to ask her to stay with him. No matter how fond of him she had become, there were people she loved, and who loved her, in the town below. She had a whole life waiting for her down there, and he couldn’t ask her to give it up for his sake—and that’s exactly what she would have to do, if she stayed here. He was a kodor, hated and feared by humans. His world and hers were irreconcilable, there was no possible way she could have both.

She was going to leave, and he was going to have to learn how to live without her, no matter how much it hurt.

When he returned to the cabin, he was quiet and withdrawn. Karen thought nothing of it at first—a bit of of silence between them was normal, and comfortable, after all the weeks they had lived together. But as afternoon turned into evening, and they ate their dinner, he continued so quiet that she began to be concerned. This wasn’t the pleasant silence they often fell into, a shared, companionable thing. This felt like he was closed off from her, locked away in a silence of his own that she had no part of.

“Matt, what’s troubling you?” she asked. “You’ve had something on your mind ever since you came home this afternoon. What is it?”

Matt sighed. Of course she had noticed—she had come to know him so well! Well, there was no point in evading the truth. He would just have to put the best face on it he could.

“The snow’s beginning to melt,” he answered her. “The season’s changing. Spring is coming.” He paused, and when she said nothing, he added, “You’ll be able to go home soon.” He did his best to keep his voice from betraying his feelings, but the words came out flat and lifeless.

Karen drew in a startled breath. Spring, already? She knew she had been here for months, and yet it didn’t seem possible that the whole winter had passed so soon. She should have been looking forward to returning home, and yet….

She missed her parents, of course. And the house she had grown up in, and the shop where she had learned the bookbinder’s trade, dogging her brother’s steps, determined to learn everything that he did. She missed the town as well, all the familiar places, the people she had known her entire life.

But now that the time to return was suddenly drawing near, her heart sank. Going home meant leaving Matt, and that was the last thing she wanted to do. Looking back over the last few months, she realized that the bond that had grown between them was one of the closest she had ever known, and she felt a sudden irresistible longing to hold onto it, and to him.

But how could she stay here? She owed her parents an explanation, of her own behavior and of Kevin’s death. And it was time to face her future. She had had a breathing space here, a peaceful time to heal from her various hurts, but she couldn’t keep hiding forever.

Besides, this was Matt’s home, not hers, no matter how much like home it had come to feel. She couldn’t simply invite herself to stay, without a word from him.

“Oh,” she said, her voice as flat as his. “Yes, I suppose so. It will be good to see my parents again.”

He heard her lack of conviction, and remembered that she had once said her parents were sure to be angry at her for running away.

“Do you still think they’ll be angry?” he asked, trying to shake off his own gloom and converse normally.

Karen gladly seized on this idea as a explanation for the reluctance he had clearly noticed. “I don’t know, I truly don’t. It’s been so long, maybe just coming home alive will be enough for me to be forgiven. But I’m going to have to tell them about Kevin, and that’s going to be hard for all of us.”

She sighed, thinking about the home she had left behind—and realizing just how little she had thought about it these last weeks. “It won’t be the same, without him there,” she said sadly.

That was something Matt understood all too well. Familiar places and things could be painful reminders of the dead. There were no memories of her brother here, in this cabin. But once she returned home, they would be everywhere, in the town as well as her parents’ house. If she seemed less than excited about going home, she had plenty of reason.

It had nothing to do with him.

* * *

As the days grew warmer, and the snow continued to melt, neither of them mentioned their coming separation. They went about their daily tasks as they had all winter, but now whenever Matt went out into the forest, Karen always went with him. She felt the last days of her time with him slipping through her fingers, and wanted as much of his company as she could get before she must leave him.

She could see now, all too clearly, that her feelings for him were deeper than simple friendly affection. Her heart ached at the thought of leaving him, and she knew that she had fallen in love at last—with someone she couldn’t have.

Back in the cabin, when they read together or talked, Matt did his best not to fall into moody silence, but to keep the conversation going, to store up as many memories as he could. Memories would be all he had for company, once Karen was gone.

He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, but he knew that he had to let her go. He had never expected to fall in love, but he was certain that what he was feeling now couldn’t be anything else.

Neither one of them could pretend to be as happy as they had been before, but they never mentioned that, either.

The forest was changing every day. They began to go for walks together simply for pleasure, and he took what happiness he could from the fact that until she left, he could share the changing forest with her. The snow that covered the trees was melting, sliding from the branches with wet plops. The snow on the ground was soft, and grew thinner and patchier, the brown of dead leaves showing through. The first spring plants began to put up tiny green shoots.

The stream was still frozen over, but they could hear the rush of running water beneath the surface. And there were birds, more and more of them as time went on, their songs filling the forest, more than Karen had ever heard before.

And still, neither of them suggested that they go and see if the road was clear. When they walked through the forest, it was always in the other direction, by an impulse as shared as it was unspoken. Neither of them wanted to know for certain if Karen’s way home was open yet.

This mutual denial of what they both knew was coming lasted until, one evening, dark clouds rolled in, and a heavy rain began to fall. The next day, so much more snow had melted that they couldn’t deny the truth any longer. Spring had arrived.

“Are there ever mudslides up here, when everything is so wet?” asked Karen, knowing she was grasping at straws.

“It might be safer to wait a few more days, to give the road a chance to dry out,” Matt answered, knowing they were just delaying the inevitable.

The water ran off, the ground dried, and they had no more excuses left. On their last evening together, they ate a somber dinner, and then Karen gathered together her few belongings.

She planned to start first thing in the morning, and she didn’t know how she was going to bear it. Her reasons for going were as strong as ever, but her desire to stay was equally strong, leaving her hopelessly torn. She knew that when she left, she would be leaving her heart here with Matt.

Matt picked up his wood carvings from their shelf, clearing his throat to dislodge the lump that had risen there. He still had no right to ask her to give up everything for him, no matter how desperately he wanted to. When she left in the morning, she would be taking his heart away with her.

He brought the carvings to her, where she stood by the bed packing her mended satchel.

“Take these,” he said softly. “Please. I want you to have them.”

She looked up, and saw the sadness in his eyes, and could hardly keep her own from tearing up.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “They’re beautiful, don’t you want to keep them?”

“You know I never keep my work,” he said, trying to smile. “I only kept these because you liked them. Please take them, as something to remember me by.” His voice broke then, despite his best efforts.

She took them, her hands shaking, and placed them carefully in the satchel. “Thank you,” she whispered. She cleared her throat, and tried to steady her voice. “I don’t need anything to remember you, though. I’ll never forget you, never.”

He drifted a step closer, hardly knowing that he did. “I’ll never forget you, either,” he said, and had to bite his lips to keep himself from begging her to stay.

Karen could see that he was just as miserable as she was, and suddenly she couldn’t stand it any longer. He hadn’t asked her to stay, and he still wasn’t asking, but they were both so unhappy that surely it couldn’t make things any worse if she spoke out anyway. She remembered the dreadful two days after her fever when they had barely spoken to each other, each of them thinking it was what the other wanted, and she made up her mind: she was not going to walk out of his life without telling him plainly how she felt.

“Matt,” she said, taking both his hands in hers. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, with you.”

The look of incredulous hope that broke over his face was everything she could have asked for.

“Really?” he asked, hardly daring to believe it. “But…your parents?”

“I’ll have to tell them what happened to Kevin, of course,” she admitted. “It would be cruel not to. But after that…”

He squeezed her hands, hope warring with fear. “You’d come back here? Will they let you?”

“It’s not up to them,” she replied, lifting her chin. “They can’t stop me, unless they lock me up like a criminal. I can’t tell them where I’m going, of course. I’d never put you in danger. But I snuck out once, I can do it again. I love you, Matt, and I want to stay with you.”

Hope burned higher, but he couldn’t help asking, “You’d give up you whole life, for me?”

In answer, she reached up to cup his face with one hand, and kissed him.

One soft press of her lips to his, and then she drew back and waited, her heart pounding.

He looked stunned, but he quickly leaned forward and returned her kiss, his arms going around her waist and pulling her close.

Joy filled her, warm and intoxicating. He _did_ want her to stay, only his own scruples had kept him silent. She smiled against his lips, wrapping her arms around him and pressing even closer.

Neither one of them had much experience at kissing, and they were tentative at first. But they quickly gained confidence, all their pent-up unhappiness released in a rush of elation, kissing again and again and holding each other like they never wanted to let go.

Matt felt dazed, hardly able to believe his own happiness. It occurred to him that he hadn’t actually told her how he felt, and he pulled back long enough to say, “I love you, Karen. Please stay with me.” His voice came out husky and a little breathless.

“Of course I will,” she answered, her voice sounding the same as his, and pulled him back in.

They clung together, their kisses growing deeper and more lingering. Matt could hear both of their hearts pounding, and the small, involuntary sounds they were both making. He felt her body pressed against his, the warm softness of her mouth…and then she ran her fingers up into his hair, and he felt her stroking one of his horns, and nearly moaned out loud.

His horns weren’t particularly sensitive; it was the fact that she was touching them at all that almost undid him. Those horns were the one proof of his kodor blood that never went entirely away, the one ever-present evidence of what he was. And she was touching them, gently, lovingly. She wasn’t ignoring his kodor side, wasn’t pretending he was human—she accepted, she _loved,_ all of him. He melted against her, feeling that his heart might burst from happiness.

But then another sound broke through his blissful absorption, and he raised his head sharply to listen.

Karen saw his arrested expression, but as she drew breath to speak, he placed a finger on her lips. “Shhhh,” he warned, and she waited, straining her own ears in vain.

“Someone’s outside,” he said after a moment, his voice low and urgent. “I can hear six…eight heartbeats.”

Karen frowned. What would anyone be doing so far from the road? Were they bandits? Cold dread swept over her at the thought, and she tried to stay calm. Could they possibly just be travelers who had gotten lost somehow?

“They’re too quiet,” Matt said grimly. “They must be trying not to make noise. And…” he turned his head in alarm. “They’re surrounding the house!”

No innocent, lost travelers would do that.

He sensed Karen’s fear, and kissed her quickly on the forehead. “I’ll protect you,” he promised.

Karen watched in fearful fascination as his skin flushed a deep red, his horns growing out to their full extent, his eyes kindling into bronze fire.

She felt a fierce surge of love, and an equally fierce determination that she would _not_ stand helplessly by and do nothing—but even as she caught up her satchel and felt inside for the small knife, the door burst open with a crash and men poured into the room.

Men she recognized! Thomas Chandler, John Smith, Robert Mason, William Miller…but her relief was short-lived. Each man held a bundle of leafy sticks, and as Matt turned to face them, snarling a warning, they charged at him, shouting “Kodor!” and “Demon!” and holding their bundles out before them. And as the sticks touched him, Matt screamed in pain. _Hellbane!_

“Stop!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the shouts of the men and Matt’s cries. He was leaning forward, pushing, forcing the melee back out the door and away from her, but they surrounded him, holding the hellbane pressed against his chest, his arms, his back. He writhed in pain, unable to command his body to fight.

“Come on, lads, we’ve got him!” the stonemason shouted, and the men standing guard outside each window ran around to the front to help. “Don’t let him run, now!”

Karen ran outside after them, and began pounding on the nearest back with her fists. “No!” she shouted desperately. “Stop, don’t hurt him! STOP!”

The blacksmith turned, and nearly dropped his hellbane in his surprise.

“Karen?” he asked, astonished. “By all the gods, Karen Page! Have you been here, all this time?”

“Yes!” she cried. But before she could say more, he turned and aimed a savage kick at the struggling Matt.

“What have you done with her, you devil?” he roared. The other men, bent on forcing Matt down onto the ground, hadn’t even noticed her.

“NO!” she shouted. “John, listen to me! Please! He saved my life!”

The smith turned back to her, his expression grim. “Karen, kodors are violent, evil creatures. They’re a danger to us all, and have got to be put down.”

“He’s not evil!” she cried. “He’s kind, he took me in when I was hurt and took care of me! You’re wrong, you have to stop this!”

“Your mind’s clouded,” he said firmly. “If it did take you in, instead of killing you, then it was for some evil purpose of its own.”

He wasn’t going to listen. Her disbelief was quickly changing to pure fear—they were going to kill Matt, right here, if she didn’t stop them.

She thought once again of the knife in her satchel, hanging forgotten over her shoulder. But even if she could bring herself to use it, against men she had known all her life, she knew she could never hope to prevail against so many.

Could she persuade any of the others to listen to her? She tried to push past John, but he held her back, his arms as strong and unyielding as the iron he forged. Panic gave her strength, but she was still no match for the burly blacksmith.

“Matt!” she shouted desperately, tears filling her eyes. “Matt, no!”

If he made any reply, she couldn’t hear it in the confusion of noise the others were making. She could hardly see him through the press of men surrounding him, but she could see he was still thrashing and struggling.

And then, one man raised his hand high, a single stick clenched in his fist, and brought it stabbing down.

_If it pierces our skin, it poisons us. It only takes a twig to kill us._

She screamed, staring in horror as the thrashing stopped with a dreadful abruptness.

Everything was suddenly quiet, the only sounds the men’s panting, and Karen’s sobs as she began to cry, her fear turning to shock and devastation. Those who hadn’t realized she was there until now stared at her in surprise.

They got to their feet and moved away from the body, and she saw him, lying on his back, terribly still, a stick protruding from his chest.

“Oh, no,” she whispered, stunned. “Oh no, no.” She shook her head in denial, feeling numb, tears flowing down her cheeks. She would have fallen to her knees, but John Smith held her up.

“It’s all over now, Karen,” he said. “We’ll take you home, your parents have been worried sick. What’s become of your brother?”

“He was killed by bandits,” she answered dully. “They went for me, too, but Matthew saved me. And now you’ve killed him.”

The men exchanged startled looks.

“We did what had to be done,” said Thomas Chandler. “You’ll see that, once you’re home again and safe.”

“I was safe here,” she whispered, but no one paid any attention. Now that it was over, and there was nothing left for her to do, she felt strangely detached, watching everything as if in a dream. Someone went inside and brought out her cloak, to protect her against the cold. The men discussed whether it would be worthwhile to take anything, but decided that a kodor’s belongings were probably cursed.

“Burn the house,” opined William Miller. “Who knows but it might draw more evil to it, if it’s left standing.” The others murmured in agreement.

Karen felt a stir of protest within her—they had killed him, wasn’t that enough? Must they destroy his home, as well? But she knew she couldn't stop them.

She couldn’t bear to watch as two men went inside and scattered the burning logs from the fireplace, tearing the shutters from the windows and the linen from the bed to feed the flames. She looked instead at Matt’s beloved, dead face, blinking away her tears so she could see him clearly. 

His red skin looked grey and strange in the moonlight, just as it had on the night she first saw him. His horns gleamed, but the bronze eyes were closed forever. His face was contorted in a grimace of pain that wrung her heart, even in her numb detachment. He had died in agony.

_I love you, Matt,_ she thought. She would not say the words out loud, not in front of these men who had murdered him. _I will always love you._

Once the cabin was burning, someone suggested throwing the body inside to burn with it. But when they tried to move him, they found that he was stuck fast to the earth, and they drew back uneasily.

“Leave him for the ravens and the wolves then, if they’ll have him,” said the stonemason, with a shrug.

It seemed there was nothing left to do. “Will the fire spread?” asked Alan Cooper.

“Not at this time of year,” answered the chandler. “No undergrowth yet, and it’s far enough from the trees. Leave it.”

And they did, all turning away from the blaze to head back to the road. Karen went reluctantly—even dead, she didn’t want to leave Matt. But she had no choice.

Some of the men spoke to her as they made their way through the forest. In the face of her obvious distress, no one was brash enough to say anything about what had just happened. But they offered her condolences on her brother’s death. She hardly knew what she said to them in response. How could they not see that what they had just done was no different from what the bandits had done to Kevin?

There were horses standing in the road, their reins tied to trees. They were beginning to shift uneasily, as the smell of burning reached their sensitive noses. The men quickly untied them and mounted, the smith taking Karen with him on his horse, a great strong beast that would, he said, hardly notice the extra weight.

_It’s all over now._ The peace Karen had found here, the happiness, the love, all of them had their source in Matt, and all were destroyed forever now that he was dead. She began to cry again as they rode away, weeping silently as they made their way down the mountain, back to Fagan Corners.


	13. Chapter 13

It was late at night when they reached Fagan Corners, and the whole group rode straight to the Pages’ bookshop. John Smith crowded his horse right up to the door, reaching out to pound on it with his fist.

“Paxton!” he shouted. “Penelope! Come down and let us in, we’ve found your daughter!” He continued to pound until a light was seen in an upper window. Then he edged his horse back away from the door, and dismounted. He was tying the reins to the hitching post when the door opened, to reveal both Karen’s parents standing in the doorway.

They stared in astonishment at the group of men and horses in the street, until their eyes fell on Karen, still on the smith’s horse, stiff from hours of riding.

“Karen!” her mother cried. Her father reached the horse in two long strides and lifted her down, and then Penelope was embracing her fiercely. For a moment, she felt like a child again, overwhelmed by the comfort of being held by her mother after the horror she had experienced. Her father embraced her, too, and she hugged them back, her numb detachment thawing like snow.

But then she noticed the way they looked past her, searching the crowd, their expressions anxious and eager, and she knew who they were looking for.

“He’s not here,” she told them. “Kevin’s dead.” Her eyes filled with tears, her older loss rising up for the moment to eclipse the newer one. “After we ran away, we were attacked by bandits in the woods, and they cut his throat.”

She watched as their expressions changed to shock and grief, the hopes raised by her own miraculous reappearance dashed forever.

“But they didn’t kill you?” asked Penelope, holding Karen away from her and looking her over for signs of injury.

“They were trying to take me alive,” said Karen quietly.

Her mother’s face paled, a look of horror flashing across it. “Karen—did they…”

“No, Mother,” Karen reassured her quickly. “I was saved, by…” and then her new grief rose back up again, so powerful that she couldn’t speak, and she burst into fresh tears, her whole body wracked with sobs. Her mother embraced her again, and her father said something to the smith, too low for her to catch. But she heard his answer.

“There was a kodor up on the mountain. Yes, another one, I’m thinking maybe the first one was its sire. A stranger passed through town a few months ago, just before that first big blizzard, and said he’d seen the creature. So a few of us decided to go up and have a look, once the snow melted. And that’s where we found your daughter. She was with the kodor, in its lair.”

“He saved me!” Karen cried. “He was a person, not a _creature!_ He saved me from the bandits, he took me in and healed my injuries, he was kind! And you murdered him!”

The smith’s expression was grim. “Putting down a dangerous creature is no murder,” he said, his voice tight. “Likely enough it did kill the bandits. But I ask you, Paxton, is there any wholesome reason a kodor would take in a human woman and keep her for months? It had some evil purpose, mark my words, and it must have warped Karen’s mind somehow.”

“You’re wrong,” Karen sobbed, despair filling her. They would never believe her, no matter how many times she said it.

“Penelope,” said her father. “The girl’s clearly distraught. Take her inside and put her to bed, and she can tell us the full tale in the morning.”

Penelope turned toward the door, her arm around Karen, and Karen allowed herself to be led inside. There was no use in standing in the street arguing. Matt was dead, and nothing she could say would bring him back.

She heard the smith call out, “You can be off, lads, I’ll tell Paxton whatever he wants to know,” and she suddenly felt sick, wondering if they would go to the tavern to boast about what they had done. The story was bound to spread through the town like wildfire, and she didn’t know how she was going to bear hearing it spoken of everywhere.

She followed her mother upstairs, crying quietly. She was exhausted, both emotionally and physically, and it was a relief to fall into bed and lose herself, if only temporarily, in sleep.

* * *

She woke up the next morning with a start, and looked about her in wonder. She lay in her own bed, in the room where she had slept for most of her life, and for a moment she couldn’t think what she was doing there. 

Then her memory came rushing back, and grief rolled over her in a wave. She closed her eyes against it, and lay very still, unwilling to face the truth, but unable to escape it. Matt was dead. A small moan of protest escaped her, and she pressed her hands against her mouth to muffle the sound. Matt was dead, and she was…home.

She stared around the room, which looked strangely unfamiliar after her months of absence. Nothing had changed since she saw it last, but it looked different, somehow, than her memory of it. 

How could this be home, when she felt like a stranger? When there was no Matt sleeping nearby? Or awake before her and stirring up the fire, ready to greet her with a smile when she woke?

Pain engulfed her, made worse by the knowledge that she could expect no comfort from anyone else. She would have the town’s sympathy for the loss of her brother, but none at all for the loss of the man she loved. Worse, they would be glad he was dead.

She turned over in the bed, intending to bury her face in the pillow, but drew back sharply when she encountered something hard and lumpy. Feeling under the covers, puzzled, she pulled out her satchel. She didn’t remember taking it to bed with her, but she knew she had clung to it last night as her mother led her up the stairs.

She reached inside and found, among her other belongings, the carvings Matt had given her. A lump rose in her throat as she drew them out and looked at them, untouched by the disaster that had overtaken their creator. They were all she had left of him now. She stroked them gently, and held them to her chest, and then she did bury her face in the pillow, tears of hopeless heartbreak sobbed quietly into the linen. 

She could hear her parents moving about in the next room and talking, their low voices an unintelligible murmur, and after a while she dried her eyes and sat up. This morning she must tell them her story, and she was both looking forward to it and dreading it. 

She was eager to defend Matt—if there was anyone in the town who would believe her, surely it was her own parents. But she was also going to have to tell them why she had run away, and how Kevin had died, and all her guilt revived at the thought.

But it had to be done. It was Kevin’s story as well as her own, and she owed him a faithful accounting. And her parents deserved to know the truth, it was all she could give them now that their son was gone forever. She would tell her tale without flinching, evading none of the blame she had earned.

She got up and dressed, the sense of strangeness she felt persisting. It had been months since she had needed to choose which dress to put on, and she stared at the gowns in her cupboard. She felt a homesick longing for anything connected to Matt, but she knew her parents would think it odd if she put back on the same dress she had worn all winter. She sighed, and chose another.

Breakfast was strange, as well. Bread and butter, cheese, her mother’s plum preserves, all were things she hadn’t tasted since she left home. As good as they were (and she was a little surprised to find she could still feel hungry, even in her unhappiness), they had become as unfamiliar as her room. Somewhat to her relief, her parents didn’t feel like strangers; but they were quiet and anxious, asking no questions until after they had eaten, but clearly eager to hear her story.

Once breakfast was finished, she told them. It was hard, as she had known it would be. She couldn’t bear to look at her parents’ faces at first, as she told them about her desperate search for alternatives to marriage, and her decision to seek sanctuary in the temple. She stared at her hands, clasped together so tightly the knuckles were white, as she told them about the attack of the bandits, and Kevin’s death.

She told of her own injuries, of waking up in a strange house, being cared for by a strange man, and then realizing that man was the kodor who had fought the bandits. Her voice grew steadier as she told them how kind Matt was—she couldn’t deny that he had killed three men, but she emphasized that he had done so to protect her, and had always treated her with respect and consideration.

She explained that by the time her injuries were healed and she was fit to travel, they were snowed in. She told them a little of the pleasant winter she had spent in Matt’s company, hoping she could convince them that he was a good person. The one thing she omitted was her realization, once spring came, that she didn’t want to leave him. It would only hurt them further, and it made no difference now, so she let them believe that she would have come home voluntarily before too much longer.

When she had finished, her parents exchanged a long, unreadable look.

“Do you believe me?” she asked hesitantly. “Do you believe that…that Matthew wasn’t a monster?”

“We know you wouldn’t lie to us,” her father answered, looking troubled. “But no-one else will believe such a tale, that’s certain.”

“And there’s no bringing him back, even if our men were wrong to kill him,” Penelope added practically. “What’s done is done.”

Karen’s heart sank. “Are you saying I shouldn’t defend him?” she demanded. “I shouldn’t say what I know is true?”

“It won’t do any good,” her mother replied bluntly. “It won’t change anyone’s mind, and if you insist on debating the matter publicly, you’ll only convince the whole town that you’re deluded. I know you want to stand up for what’s right, but sometimes it isn’t worth it.”

And it might reflect badly on them, as well as herself, Karen realized. What would it mean for her parents, if everyone thought their daughter had lost her reason? John Smith had said last night that her mind must be warped. Would he, or would the men with him, say so to others? If they hadn’t already, they surely would if she insisted on defending Matt.

How many of the Pages’ neighbors had been awakened by the commotion in the street last night, and how much had they heard? Was the rumor already spreading that Karen Page was out of her wits?

Her anger ebbed, leaving her feeling defeated and helpless. “I understand,” she said, blinking back tears.

Her parents looked relieved.

“No-one will speak ill of you if you give them no reason to,” her father said. Karen doubted that, but she said nothing. “We’re glad to have you safely back,” he went on, “And so I’ll tell anyone who has anything to say about it.” He rose and turned toward the stairs. 

“Do you mean to open the shop today?” Penelope asked. “Surely there’s no need, no-one would wonder if we didn’t. It will only encourage people to gawk at us and gossip.”

“People are going to talk, whether we let them in our doors or not,” Paxton answered. “I’d rather hear for myself whatever’s being said. And they may say less, if my door is open and they have to say it to my face. But Karen had best stay up here today. There’s no reason to put her on display for folk to stare at.”

“Agreed. If you need help, I’ll come down myself.”

Karen was glad to be excused from working in the shop. “Thank you,” she told them both, a little unsteadily. “I would rather not have to face the whole town just yet.”

What she wanted was to be left in peace to mourn her loss. But she knew her mother didn’t approve of idleness, and wouldn’t understand the depth of Karen’s grief. She hadn’t told them she was in love with Matt, and she wasn’t at all sure how much Penelope would sympathize even if she had.

Once Paxton had gone, Penelope confirmed Karen’s thoughts.“There’s plenty of work to be done up here,” she said, with a slightly strained smile. “I’ll be glad to have some help.”

“Of course, Mother,” she answered quietly. She cleared the breakfast dishes from the table, subdued and listless. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her as she put away the leftover food, and wondered what she was thinking. She had said no word of blame, but surely she must think Karen had been wrong to run away.

After they had washed and dried the dishes together, and the silence between them had stretched for several minutes, Penelope spoke. “You may be interested to know,” she said, her voice carefully bland, “James Wesley married Joan Shepard, not long after you disappeared.”

“Did he?” Karen replied. “I’m glad.”

Penelope looked at her sharply, and Karen wondered what she expected. Did she think Karen would be disappointed, that a man she had never wanted had married someone else?

“I hope she’ll be happy with him,” she said, and meant it. Joan was a quiet woman with few close friends, and Karen wasn’t very well acquainted with her, but she hoped she was content with the match. It was hard to imagine any woman actually caring for James Wesley, but Karen hoped for her sake that she at least had no strong objections to him. 

No, there was no reason for Karen to feel disappointed at her mother’s news. But perhaps Penelope was. Did she still wish to see Karen married, even though the necessity was now gone?

Well, Karen did not wish it. The only man she wanted was dead. She was relieved to know that Mr. Wesley was safely married to someone else, if her mother was still hoping to marry her off.

“Is this the last of the soap, Mother, or do we have more somewhere?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject, and to her relief Penelope let Mr. Wesley’s marriage drop. 

The day passed quietly, in domestic tasks. The house began to feel more familiar as they cleaned, and cooked, and mended; but both women were unusually silent as they worked. 

The hum of voices could be heard indistinctly from the shop below, as people came and went. Now and then Paxton would call up the stairs for Penelope, and she would go down to help for a while. She would come back with her lips pressed together in a tight line, but Karen didn’t ask any questions. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

As time went on, however, she couldn’t help but notice a certain coolness in her mother’s manner. Her expression when she looked at Karen was closed, and whenever she did speak, her voice carried a note of suppressed emotion of some kind. 

Karen concluded that Penelope was angry. Whatever was being said downstairs by the townspeople, it must not be good. While Penelope might be sincerely relieved that her daughter had been neither killed nor raped, Karen could see that she blamed her, both for the death of her brother and for the unwelcome notoriety she had now brought on the family. Karen had expected her mother to be angry with her, but it was a lonely feeling to be proven right.

Kevin would have been more understanding—but Kevin was gone. She missed him, the loss cutting her afresh now that she was back in this house where everything reminded her of him. It seemed impossible that he wasn’t downstairs with their father right now. She could almost hear his voice singing the bawdy song he had sung on the day her mother told her she must marry. But he would never sing again, would never tease her, never grin at her, never sit beside her at the dinner table or work beside her in their father’s workshop. 

She knew her mother was also mourning Kevin, and her feelings toward Karen were colored by grief. But their shared bereavement could do nothing to bring them closer together, when Karen herself was the cause of it.

Her own guilt, and her mother’s silent condemnation, reminded her painfully of Matt’s empathy and kindness. She recalled how he had tried to ease her self-blame, and her heart broke all over again. How could she bear to never see him again, never hear his beloved voice, never feel the touch of his hand on hers? 

She did her housework mechanically, unhappiness filling her until she thought it must become visible, hanging around her like a vapor. When her father finally closed the shop for the night and came upstairs for dinner, Karen felt more depressed than she could ever remember being before.

“The story’s all over town already,” said Paxton, looking harried. “Everyone who came into the shop was buzzing with it. Some of them offered condolences for Kevin’s death, but more wanted to talk about the fact that my daughter spent the winter in a kodor’s lair.”

Karen frowned. _It was a perfectly nice cabin. Not a_ lair.

“What did you tell them?” Penelope asked, looking worried.

“I told everyone how glad we are to have her back again, safe and sound,” he answered. “I made sure they all know that she’s not been harmed, and is as sound in her wits as they are. Not everyone will believe it, but they won’t dare to say otherwise to my face, or yours.”

“Good,” said Penelope, her expression clearing. “But what did you say about the kodor?”

“As little as I could. As long as I kept saying that he didn’t hurt Karen, they could hardly expect me to call him a vicious monster. Though you may as well know,” he looked at Karen somberly, “There are some who’ve gotten the story so mixed that they think it was the kodor that killed Kevin.”

Karen made a wordless sound of protest, shocked.

“I set them straight,” he assured her. “Thomas Chandler stopped by early to ask how you were, and I got him to tell me all about the stranger who started the rumor that there was another kodor up there. By the sound of things, that man was your escaped bandit. It was him and his mates that killed Kevin, and so I told everyone who tried to say otherwise.”

He sighed. “But since you’re the only witness, whether or not people believe it will likely depend on whether or not they believe your mind’s been addled. It’s a proper mess,” he concluded.

Karen felt deeply thankful that she hadn’t been in the shop with him, and had to face such avid curiosity and wild speculation herself.

“Thank you, Father,” she said sadly. “I never meant to cause so much trouble, I swear.”

He patted her hand, but didn’t meet her eyes. “You’re my daughter,” he told her. “You’ve made some foolish choices, and we’re all suffering the consequences. But there’s no changing that now. What’s done is done. I’ll protect you from prying eyes, and as much as I can from wagging tongues. I just hope the gossip dies down quickly.”

“Gods willing,” Penelope agreed fervently.

Karen said nothing. She saw that her father, too, blamed her for Kevin’s death. Even if the gossip did die down quickly, and she was able to take her place again in the life of the town, her relationship with her parents was changed forever. 

It would be different if Kevin had died by some accident or illness. But as it was, with all three of them holding Karen responsible, a barrier had come between her and her parents. Even if no word of blame was spoken, even if they treated her no less kindly than they used to, she was isolated from them by her guilt.

After dinner, Penelope said, “If there’s so much gossip circulating already, I think I’d better talk to Amelia. We could use her help.”

Amelia Baker was the town’s recognized authority when it came to gossip. She was interested in everything that happened in Fagan Corners, but she was also a shrewd woman, not given to flights of fancy. Everyone knew that her version of any given rumor was likely to be true.

“Good idea,” Paxton agreed.

“It’s too late for a visit this evening,” she went on, “but if you’ll come with me, we can drop by the bakery and ask her to call here tomorrow.”

“All right,” he said. “Karen, you won’t mind being left alone here for a few minutes?”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured them. She was not eager to face the scrutiny of Amelia Baker, but Penelope was right—she would make a useful ally. No doubt she had heard some version of the story by now, and she would feel flattered to be the first to see Karen and hear her account in person. If anyone could stem the wilder streams of gossip, it was her.

Once her parents had left on their errand, Karen found that she did mind, after all, being alone. The town that surrounded her on all sides no longer felt as safe or as friendly as it once had. It was uncomfortable to think that she must be the topic of conversation at dinner tables throughout the town, and to know that people were speculating freely about her health and sanity.

And even worse was the knowledge that it was men she had known all her life that had killed Matt. All of them good men, she would have said two days ago. What was she to think now? How could she meet them in the street, or do business with them, knowing what they had done? Knowing that all of her friends and neighbors probably approved of their actions? 

Fagan Corners had always been her home, but now it seemed a hostile, unfriendly place. It had already judged Matt a monster, and executed him. Now it was judging her—as what? A victim? A fool? A madwoman?

She had felt safer in Matt's cabin on the mountain, even when he was out in the woods and she was alone, than she did alone here in her father’s house. How could she hope to make a life for herself here, now? What was she going to do?

* * *

The next morning, Amelia Baker came to call. Karen told her story again, finding it even more difficult this time, with Amelia examining her keenly the whole time. She knew it was important to seem as sane as possible, so she tried to keep her emotions in check, and keep to simple facts. Matthew had saved her from the bandits who had killed Kevin, he healed her injuries, he sheltered her through the winter. He had done nothing to harm her, and had treated her with courtesy.

When she had finished, Amelia gave her a shrewd look. “You were fond of this kodor?” she asked.

Karen met her eyes firmly. “Yes, I was,” she answered. Pouring out her feelings would do no good, but in justice to Matt she felt compelled to add, “He was kind to me.”

Amelia nodded. “And he was all the company you had, all winter,” she mused.

“Yes, of course,” sad Karen.

“Well.” Amelia folded her hands in her lap. “You’re not mad, that’s clear enough.”

Karen and Penelope both relaxed. If Amelia Baker believed it, others would, too.

Then she pinned Karen with her gaze and asked sharply, “Are you pregnant?”

Karen's mouth fell open in shock. “Pregnant? No!” she exclaimed.

Penelope had gone pale. “Who is saying she is?” she demanded.

Amelia shrugged. “I heard it from several different people, each of whom said they’d heard it from someone else,” she replied. “You know how these things spread. And I must say, I’m not surprised. Most people find it impossible to credit that a kodor would take in a human and let her live with him, rather than killing her. Since that is undoubtedly what happened, they need to find a believable explanation. And if the human in question is an attractive young woman, well. To many, the answer seems obvious.”

Karen buried her face in her hands. “Gods,” she said despairingly. “Is there no end to this? Why can’t they leave me in peace?” She raised her head and looked Amelia in the eye once again. “I never lay with him,” she said, steadying her voice with an effort. “But it would be no-one else’s business if I had!”

“Well, their business or not, people are talking,” said Amelia practically. “You’d better take her to Claire, Penelope.”

Penelope frowned. “Is that necessary?” she asked. “If we go to see the midwife, won’t that just confirm people’s suspicions?”

“Not if Claire tells people afterward that Karen isn’t pregnant,” Amelia replied. “She would if you asked, she’s defended girls before who were suspected unjustly, and people trust her word. She’s the best person possible to put the pregnancy rumor, at least, to rest. I can tell people what I think, and so I will. But you need proof. And that means either Claire, or time. And I don’t think you can afford to wait. It could take months before everyone is convinced she’s not pregnant. And in the meantime, there are bound to be some who will treat her like it’s true—like she’s carrying a kodor’s young.”

She looked gravely at Penelope, and then at Karen. Karen felt a sick wave of apprehension. Given what people thought of kodors, she could guess what they would think of a human woman pregnant with one. She would have felt no shame in carrying Matt’s child, if it had been true, but that didn’t mean she wanted to face the scorn, the disgust, possibly the abuse, of others.

“Do it soon, Penelope,” Amelia advised. “No-one will blame you for keeping Karen at home yesterday, it’s what any mother would do. But keep her up here too long, and people will begin to think you’re hiding something.”

Penelope looked at Karen. “Are you willing to have Claire examine you?” she asked.

Karen knew such an examination would probably be uncomfortable. But Claire was competent and nonjudgmental, and would not make it any worse than necessary. And once it was done, her word would be believed. “Yes, I’m willing,“ she said. “Let’s get it over with, before the rumors get any worse.” 

“Good girl,” Amelia said approvingly. “Go today, Penelope. In fact, if you’re free now, I’ll walk over with you.”

Karen looked at her in surprise. Countering rumors was one thing. But to walk down the street beside the subject of those rumors was a public gesture of solidarity that she hadn’t expected.

“Do you believe me, then?” she asked hopefully. “Do you believe that Matthew took me in out of kindness, and that he wasn’t evil?”

But Amelia was not to be drawn into giving a definite opinion. “No theological discussions for me, thank you,” she said firmly. “The true nature of kodors, only the gods know for certain. But you’ve always been a good girl, Karen, if a bit headstrong, and I’ll not see your reputation dragged through the muck over something that’s over and done with.”

Karen sighed, her brief hopes dashed. But still, she had gained an ally for herself, if not for Matt, and she was grateful.

“Thank you,” she said. “I do appreciate this, it’s very kind of you.”

“Yes indeed, thank you, Amelia,” said Penelope.

“You’re very welcome,” Amelia answered, and they gathered their cloaks and went downstairs to the workroom together. Penelope went into the front of the shop for a moment to have a discreet word with her husband, and then the three women left by the back door.

The walk to the midwife’s house wasn’t long, but Karen felt so conspicuous that it seemed much longer. Everyone they passed on the street stared at her. No-one was bold enough to say anything to her, flanked as she was by her mother and Amelia Baker, but she could hear the hum of subdued conversation behind her after they passed.

Penelope and Amelia walked with their heads held high, their expressions pleasant and bland, as if this were a perfectly ordinary morning walk. Karen strove to imitate them, but it wasn’t easy.

As they reached their destination, someone across the street was finally brash enough to call out, “Good morning, Mistress Page! Going to call on the midwife?”

Penelope’s eyes narrowed, but she answered calmly, in a voice pitched to carry well down the block.

“Yes indeed. It seems we have a groundless, ill-natured rumor to refute.” She turned her back on the curious, and knocked on the door.

After a brief wait, the door opened. Claire Temple looked from one to another of her visitors, smiling warmly when she saw Karen.

“Good morning, ladies. Please, come in.”

Once the door was closed, she took Penelope and Karen each by the hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about Kevin,” she said.

“Thank you,” Penelope answered, with a sigh. “But as I’m sure you can guess, it’s Karen we’ve come to see you about. Amelia has told me about the rumors currently spreading.”

Claire nodded in acknowledgement. “I’ve heard them,” she said neutrally.

“I’d like you to examine her, please, to verify that she isn’t pregnant. She’s told us that she never lay with the kodor, and we believe her.” She exchanged glances with Amelia, who nodded firmly. “But we’re aware that others may not take her word for it. For her own safety, we need proof that she’s not carrying a kodor’s child.”

Claire nodded again. “Of course. Karen, do you agree to be examined?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly. “I shouldn’t have to be, if people weren’t so determined to believe the worst. But I see the necessity.”

“Very well.” She turned back to Penelope and Amelia. “This may take some time, so the two of you don’t need to stay.” Experience had taught her that many young women were more comfortable, and honest, about answering the midwife’s questions if their mothers were absent. “I’ll bring her home when we’ve finished.”

Penelope looked questioningly at Karen.

“It’s all right, Mother. I’ll be safe enough, no-one’s going to harass me if Claire’s with me.” She turned to Amelia and added, “Thank you, again, for coming with us.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered briskly. “The sooner we can put this rumor to rest, the better. Claire, please say hello to Soledad for me.” Claire’s mother was one of Amelia’s particular friends. “Come, Penelope, let’s leave them to it.” The two women left.

The nature of the midwife’s work meant that often, she went to her patients. But sometimes people came to her, and so her house had a private room set aside for consultations. She led Karen there now for her examination.

Claire looked her over her carefully, asking a series of questions while feeling, looking and listening to various parts of her body, even smelling her breath. It was as uncomfortable as Karen had feared, but Claire’s manner was soothingly calm and matter-of-fact.

When it was over, Claire told her, “I can find no evidence of pregnancy. Now, ordinarily I would keep the results of such an examination confidential, or tell only the family. But in this case, I gather you’d like me to counter the gossip being spread about you.”

“Yes,” said Karen. “That was the whole point of coming to you. No-one will take my word for it, or Mother’s, or even Mrs. Baker’s. But you’ll be believed. Is that—are you willing to do that? To publicly refute the gossip? It might be unpleasant for you.”

“So it might,” Claire agreed. “But it’ll be more unpleasant for you if I don’t. I’m willing, if you’re willing to have your personal business spread all over town.”

“It seems it already is,” said Karen bitterly. “If they must talk about me, let it be the truth, at least.”

“All right then. You won’t be the first woman I’ve defended, although your case is more…inflammatory…than most.”

“Only because people are determined to believe kodors are evil,” Karen replied, even more bitterly. “Mrs. Baker said the rumor began because people needed some explanation for why Matthew would take me in and not hurt me. He did it because he was kind! He was truly a good person, but no-one will believe it! Some people even—my father said that some people think it was Matthew that killed Kevin.”

She couldn’t even say the terrible words without a lump rising in her throat. “He would never! He killed the bandits who attacked us, but he did it to protect me. Not so he could have me for himself—because he was _good!_ ” Her throat closed up completely and she fell silent, overcome by anger, and helplessness, and grief.

Claire was no stranger to tearful stories from desperate women. Most of the pregnancies she attended were welcome, or at least acceptable—but not all. She had found that letting her patients unburden themselves to a sympathetic listener did them good, even if some of their problems were beyond the scope of her skills.

She sat down beside Karen on the bench, and took her hand. “Tell me,” she said gently.

Karen stared at the floor, blinking back her tears. “You won’t believe me. Nobody does. They think I’ve lost my mind.”

“I’ve heard that rumor, too,” Claire admitted. “But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your mind. And I don’t believe that any intelligent creature is evil by nature.”

Karen looked up in surprise.

Clare went on, “I believe that where the gods grant intelligence, they also grant the ability, the responsibility, to choose how they behave.”

Karen smiled. “Matthew said something similar, once. He told me that all kodors have a violent streak, but that they can still choose what they do with it. Some of them do attack humans, but Matthew only went after people who were hurting others.”

Claire squeezed her hand. “That sounds like a good person to me. Will you tell me about him?”

And so Karen did. It was the third time she had told the story, but this time there was relief in it as well as pain. Finally, finally someone was willing to believe her without reservation. Someone was willing to accept that a kodor could be good. She told her tale eagerly, holding nothing back, and when she reached the end and told Claire how Matthew had died, she broke down completely, crying bitterly.

“Oh, Karen,” Claire murmured. “I’m so sorry.” She continued to hold Karen’s hand until her tears subsided, thinking about what she had heard.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” she said at length. “The rest of the town isn’t going to believe you.”

“It’s nothing but sheer, stubborn closed-mindedness!” Karen cried in frustration.

“No, I think it’s more than that,” Claire said seriously. “The men who killed Matthew, yes, they were acting on the assumption that he was evil. But now that it’s done, they’re going to believe that even more firmly than before. They have to.”

She handed Karen a handkerchief to dry her eyes. “They can’t afford to listen to you,” she went on, “because if Matthew wasn’t evil, then they were wrong to kill him. They would be murderers, in fact. They wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if you’re right, so you have to be wrong. Do you see?”

Karen stared at her. “Yes,” she answered slowly. “I see. So if Matthew kept me, he _must_ have had an evil motive, and if I defend him, then I must be mad. The night they brought me back, I told John Smith he’d murdered Matthew, and right away he said that Matthew must have warped my mind somehow.”

“It’s what they need to believe, to justify their actions,” said Claire. “And not only the men themselves, but their wives, their families, their friends and neighbors…”

Karen groaned. 

“Add in the people who _are_ just stubbornly closed-minded, and you’ve got most of the town,” Claire concluded. “Now I can tell them you’re not pregnant, but I’m afraid they’re still going to think you lay with him. It’s the only explanation, to them, that makes sense.”

“I wouldn’t be ashamed if it were true,” Karen answered quietly. “I’ll try not to feel ashamed that people think it’s true.”

“A lot of people will assume he forced you,” said Claire quietly.

Karen’s heart sank. But she knew Claire was right. “I know,” she answered, just as quietly.

“I know it hurts you, for people to think that about him. But it’s better for you if they do. If they think you lay with a kodor _willingly_ …”

“I know.”

“At best, they’ll think what the smith said—that Matthew warped your mind somehow. Enchanted you, maybe, to make you willing.”

“I suppose so.” Karen considered her options unhappily. She could either be reviled as an unnatural woman, or pitied as a victim. “It’s not fair,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” Claire agreed. “But if this world were fair, we wouldn’t need sheriffs.” She sighed, and then smiled sadly. “You cared for him a great deal, didn’t you?” she asked.

“I love him. I didn’t realize how much, until…” she pressed her lips together. “We were so happy,” she whispered.

“I’m very sorry,” Claire said again.

“Do you know, you’re the first person to say that?” Karen replied sadly. “The first person to see that I’m grieving for him, the first person to call him by his name instead of ‘the kodor’. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Claire squeezed her hand again, and they sat together in silence for a moment.

Then Karen said, “I don’t know what to do, Claire. Not about the rumors—it’s obvious I can’t do anything about them. But about my life, my future.” She told Claire what she had been thinking the night before, how the town no longer felt like home. “What kind of life can I make for myself, after this?” she finished. “Everyone thinks the worst of Matthew, and of me, and I think just as badly of them for thinking so. What am I going to do?”

Claire hummed noncommittally. “How are your parents taking it all?” she asked.

Karen sighed. “They’re glad I wasn’t hurt, and they’re doing everything they can to protect my reputation. But they blame me for Kevin’s death. I don’t fault them for that, I blame myself, too. But it means things between us can never be like they were before.”

Claire nodded in understanding. “Penelope and Paxton both came here from other towns,” she mused. “Do you have any relatives elsewhere you could visit? It might be good for you to leave Fagan Corners for a while, if there’s anywhere else you can go.”

It was a possibility Karen hadn’t considered. But Claire was right, maybe she should.

“I wouldn’t suggest it if you and your parents were very close,” Claire went on, “and if they were comforting you through your troubles. But if not…I think you’re right, living here is going to be very difficult for you, for a while at least. Maybe for a long time. So do you really need to stay?”

“It would mean leaving my parents, and going to live among strangers,” Karen said slowly, thinking it over. “There are relatives, yes. I hardly know them, we’ve only ever met a few times. But maybe I’d be better off among people who know nothing about me. For how long, though?”

“Until the gossip dies down, and people find something else to talk about.” Claire answered. But they both knew that could take quite a while. A respectable woman living with a kodor, and then taking his side against her own kind, was the most sensational story to hit the town in years. It was too much to hope that people would lose interest any time soon. 

Could she leave, not knowing when she would be coming back? She had done it once, but then she had only had to worry about her parents forgiving her before she could return. Now, she had the whole town to worry about.

But then, if Matthew hadn’t been killed, and she had stayed with him, she surely would have had to cut all ties with her parents, and the rest of the town. And he had known it. _You’d give up your whole life, for me?_ he had asked.

To be with him, yes, she would have. Could she do it, without him?

Well, after all, it might not be forever. And as a short-term solution, she could think of nothing better. “It’s a good idea,” she told Claire. “It would be a relief to get away from here for a while, and clear my head. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I don’t think I’m going to find any answers here, in the middle of all this.”

“I agree. If you like, I’ll suggest it to your mother. You’ve run away once already, she might take more kindly to the idea if it comes from someone else.”

“You’re right,” said Karen. “Let’s go and ask her, and see what she says.”

* * *

_My dear Beatrice,_

_I have some news for you, sister, and a favor to ask._

_First, I must tell you that my son Kevin is dead. He was killed by bandits in the forest on the mountain outside of town, at the beginning of winter. My daughter Karen was with him, but by good fortune she escaped his fate. Her screams alerted a hermit who lives deep in the forest—so deep, indeed, that here in the town we had no idea he was there at all. He is not sociable, and shuns company. Nevertheless, he came to Karen’s rescue, driving off the bandits, although too late to save Kevin, alas._

_Karen was injured, and the hermit took her into his home until she was healed. But a severe storm buried the mountain in snow before she was fit to travel, and in short, she was forced to remain with him all winter until the snow melted. She returned to us only two days ago, which is when Paxton and I learned what had befallen Kevin._

_So much for the news—now for the favor._

_The whole town is talking about the fact that Karen lived with this hermit for several months. No-one denies the necessity, but—well. You know what people are, especially when they are starved for fresh gossip. Karen has assured me that nothing improper occurred between them, and the midwife has examined her and confirms it. But still, the wagging tongues will not be silenced. I need not even tell you what this scandal has done for the chances of her making a decent marriage._

_It would be most advantageous, and a great relief to Karen herself, if she could remove herself from Fagan Corners until things blow over. Would you be willing to have her come and visit you?_

_She is a good, industrious girl, although you may find her low in sprits. She and Kevin were very close, and she feels his death keenly. She has had more time to grow accustomed to the loss than Paxton and I, but I believe that relating the tragedy to us has only served to renew her grief. And then, too, having the whole town spreading infamous, wholly unjust rumors about her can hardly be expected to raise her spirits._

_Please let me know soon, sister, if I may send her to you. And if you should happen to know of any suitable young men there in Weymouth, so much the better; for to be honest, my daughter did not find any of the young men here to be much to her liking, even before this unfortunate scandal._

_She is Paxton’s heir, of course, now that Kevin has been taken from us, and she knows all the elements of the book-binding trade. But if she can make a suitable marriage in Weymouth, we would not require her to make her home here. Paxton still has many years left to him, gods willing, and we have time to consider other options for the future of the business._

_I hope to hear from you soon._

_Your loving sister, Penelope_

* * *

_My dear Penelope,_

_My sincere condolences on your loss. Bandits are a scourge to all civilized people, and it is a shame indeed that some people will choose no better way to make their living than by the robbery and murder of their more industrious fellows. I thank the gods that my niece, at least, was spared, even if the instrument of her salvation has given rise to gossip and scandal._

_Of course you may send the girl to me, as soon as you like. I have only sons, as you know, and would welcome the company of another woman in the house. And the talk there in Fagan Corners will die down the more quickly, without her presence feeding it. You were wise to consult the midwife. One wishes, of course, that Karen’s word alone would have been enough, but as you say, we know what people are!_

_I will keep an eye out for suitable young men for my niece, you may be sure. I have never yet had the pleasure of arranging a match (my own sons being either too young as yet, or so headstrong that they will make their own choice and will hear no advice on the matter), and I quite look forward to the challenge._

_I will venture to mention here, sister, in case it is of interest to you, that my youngest son, Nathaniel, is clever with his hands and a great lover of books. I believe he would make Paxton a very apt and willing apprentice, if you have need of one. If it should happen that Karen does not return to you and someday (far in the future, gods willing) take charge of the business, well, would it not be better to pass it on to a nephew than to a stranger?_

_But that is, of course, for you and Paxton to decide. If you want Nathaniel, let me know, and I will be happy to send him to you._

_I look forward to renewing my acquaintance with my niece._

_Your loving sister, Beatrice_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, everyone. Real life, etc etc. It's a nice long chapter at least, I hope that makes up for it. Some notes:
> 
> -Karen is blaming herself pretty hard for Kevin's death, but that's because she's depressed, and she can see how her parents feel about it, and she's just lost the one person who was helping her take a more moderate view of her own guilt. She _knows_ Matt was right, but it's really hard to _feel_ it right now.
> 
> -Karen refers to Matt as Matthew, when talking to people who don't know him, because that's what he calls himself to strangers. Only to himself, and sometimes in her own mind, would she call him Matt.
> 
> -Penelope is definitely still hoping Karen will marry. I've tried to create a fairly egalitarian society here, so women aren't forced to marry out of economic necessity, but some parents just want their kids to get married, no matter what. Plus there's the whole "blaming Karen for what happened to Kevin" aspect--Penelope would never say she _wanted_ Karen to leave, or even admit it to herself, but she won't be too upset if Karen finds a husband and doesn't come back.
> 
> -The idea of Claire defending women's reputations is a little tricky. I don't want my fantasy society to shame people over sex, but I can imagine that falling pregnant by someone inappropriate--or being suspected of such--could still cause trouble for someone. 
> 
> In Karen's case, of course, the scandal is because Matt's a kodor, more than just the fact that she was living with him; but the edited version of the story Penelope gives her sister does imply that just living with a man would be enough to cause scandal. I guess speculating about people's sex life still makes for juicy gossip, even in a relatively tolerant society.


	14. Chapter 14

Pain.

Pain ran through his veins like fire. Every part of him burned, inside and out. Matthew coughed weakly, drew breath into his scorched lungs, and felt the erratic, shallow beating of his laboring heart.

He tried to move his arms and legs, and nearly passed out again from the pain. He focused his attention with an effort, trying to make his disordered senses give him useful information.

He heard the normal sounds of the forest, and the alarmingly unwell sounds of his own heartbeat and breathing.

He felt the ground under his back. He seemed to be far too heavy, pressed against the earth as if he had been turned into lead. He felt cold, despite the fire in his veins. Was that what had awakened him? The ground beneath him was still frozen below the thawed surface, and the air around him was very cold.

He smelled smoke, and charred wood, strong enough to obscure the normal smells of the forest, and that frightened him. If there was a fire, and he was pinned down here, unable to move….

But no. If the forest were burning, he would hear it. He frowned, trying to make sense of it, but his brain seemed as heavy as the rest of him.

Another smell tickled his nose, less powerful than the overpowering stink of smoke, but closer. He knew that smell…it meant danger, even more than the smoke…

Hellbane!

His memory came back to him in a rush.

The house had been attacked. He remembered forcing his attackers outside, away from Karen, while she shouted panicked protests behind him. 

Had they hurt her? They knew her, he remembered, one of them had called her by name. They were men from her town, and they clearly hadn’t expected to find her here. It was him they had come looking for, armed with hellbane. 

_What have you done with her, you devil?_

They had thought he was harming her. Surely they wouldn’t harm her themselves? They must have taken her back with them, back to her parents. 

She was gone, but she was safe. He hoped.

As for him, they had forced him to the ground outside, he remembered, and then…he focused his attention on his chest, high up near one shoulder, and there it was. The source of the pain, driven into his flesh and binding him to the earth.

Why wasn’t he dead?

It didn’t take this long to die from hellbane, did it? His father had led him to believe it was excruciating, but quick. He had definitely thought he was dying when they drove the skewer into his chest, but it seemed he had only blacked out. For hours, for the whole night, judging by the sounds he could hear in the forest around him. Daytime sounds.

But it hadn’t killed him. Hellbane killed kodors, everyone knew that. It had certainly killed his father.

…But Matthew wasn’t his father. Matthew was only half kodor. Was that it? Had his mother’s human blood saved him?

And would that blood also allow him to move?

He tried again, braced this time for the pain, and found he could raise one arm high enough to bend his elbow and drop his hand heavily onto his chest. He rested a while, then managed to lift his other hand up to join the first.

This next part…was going to be bad. He inched his hands over his chest, up toward the spike of hellbane sticking out of his flesh. He rested again, gathered what little strength he had, and grasped it firmly with both hands.

It was agony. He screamed, forcing himself to not let go, overriding reflex and instinct and lacerated nerves, making himself hold on, and pull. The spike came out, burning like acid as it came, and with one last effort he threw it away from him, as far as he could.

Immediately, the leaden weight disappeared.

The pain, however, did not. The poison was in his blood, and would have to run its course. Either he would recover, or he wouldn’t. But at least now, he could crawl back into his house—

They had burned his house.

He turned his head toward it, finally realizing that it was the source of the charred smell. Only a smoldering wreck remained, the fire having luckily burned itself out without spreading beyond the clearing into the surrounding trees.

He lay motionless, stunned by the loss. His house was gone. His mother’s books, his father’s tools, the simple furniture, made with such care. Everything he possessed in the world, everything he had left of his parents—gone.

After a while, he became aware once more of how cold he was, and realized that his shelter from the chancy weather of early spring was also gone. He might have survived hellbane, but if he wanted to continue surviving, he couldn’t just lie here.

He forced himself to turn over, to rise to his hands and knees, and crawl toward the ruins of his house. He needed warmth, and the wreckage was radiating residual heat from the fire. Even better, he discovered that the storeroom was still mostly intact, although the wall connecting it to the house had collapsed. He crept inside, curled up in a corner and quickly fell into an exhausted sleep.

* * *

He woke when the ruins had cooled, and he grew too cold to remain asleep. The pain was slightly better, he found, and he could move more easily. On the other hand, he was very hungry.

The last of his stored food had been in this room, and he found some dried meat that had survived the fire. Water, though, was another matter. 

There was still snow on the ground in the shady hollows of the forest, but Matthew knew better than to eat it without melting it first—he was too cold, he would lose body heat he couldn’t afford to lose if he wasted it melting snow in his mouth.

There was the stream, which he could hear rushing in the distance, finally freed of its winter ice, but he would still need some way to carry the water back here, where his food and shelter were.

The bucket had been in the destroyed main room of the house, but it had been near the storeroom, and more than half full of water. Could it have survived?

He found it just inside where the door had been. It had burned down to half its former height, but the bottom half was still intact. It held a slurry of wet ashes, which he cleaned out as best he could before making his shivering, unsteady way to the stream.

He rinsed the bucket out and filled it, stuck his face in it and drank, flinching at the icy shock of the water, and carried it carefully back to the house.

He was still exhausted, he wanted to sleep, but he knew he was too cold. He had to have fire, or he could still die, even with food and water.

His tinder box had been inside the house. The flint and steel might have survived, but if so they were buried in the wreckage. He knew how to make fire without them, but he wasn't sure if he had the strength.

He tried, because he didn’t have any choice. Slowly, painfully, he gathered up small dry twigs and pine needles for tinder. He found a stick broken off in a sharp point, and a split log from the remains of his outdoor woodpile. He placed the point of the stick on the flat, cut surface of the log, and began wearily to spin the stick between his aching hands. 

He did his best to keep the pressure steady as it drilled down into the log, until the friction produced enough heat to cause a tiny point of combustion. He blew gently on the spark, and fed it dry needles, then twigs, and then larger sticks once the tinder caught fire.

When the kindling was burning well, he carefully added a few logs, and breathed a sigh of relief. He was safe from hypothermia—as long as it didn’t rain. The storeroom had a wooden floor, like the rest of the cabin, and so he had built his fire outside to avoid the risk of burning down what little shelter he had left. He could have a roof over his head, or fire, but not both at once.

He sighed, and tried to think. One problem at a time. He warmed himself, and ate and drank, and hoped that the fire, plus his presence, would be enough to deter the animals from stealing the rest of his food. Then he lay down on the ground and slept.

* * *

The next time he woke, he felt a little better. He was cold again, and his fire had burned low, but there were still a few embers that he coaxed back into life, building the fire back up. He resolved not to let the fire go completely out, if he could help it—it was too much work to start a new one.

He ate, and drank, and took stock. He was still weak and in pain, but he was continuing to improve little by little. He still had snares set in the woods, which he could use to trap fresh meat until he was recovered enough to hunt. He had a few things that were kept in the storeroom and had survived the fire: the washtub, the shovel, and most useful of all, his axe.

There had been other tools inside the house, of which the metal parts, at least, might still be usable. He needed to search the wreckage for anything he could salvage.

The roof of the house had fallen in, and half-burned timber covered whatever might be left inside. He began laboriously to clear away the charred beams, beginning at the end nearest to the storeroom. It was slow work in his weakened state, but eventually he was rewarded with a knife, completely intact, and an iron cooking pot. The pieces of wood he had cleared were added to his meager supply of firewood. He would chop them down to a more manageable size, later.

Then he sat down beside the fire, meaning only to rest a while, but he fell asleep within minutes.

And so it went, for what what he thought must be many days, although he had no clear sense of how much time was passing. He slept a great deal, but never for more than a few hours at a time, waking whenever his fire burned low and the cold crept over him. He would build the fire back up, eat, and then work at whatever task seemed most urgent until he had to sleep again.

Food, water, and fire were the necessities that drove him. Until he had recovered from the hellbane and gotten his strength back, he couldn’t think beyond simply surviving from one day to the next. 

He carried water from the stream in his half-bucket, checked his snares for small game, and gathered the plentiful dead branches that had fallen from the trees over the winter. As time went on, the early spring plants pushed their way up through the thawing soil, and he gathered whatever he could find that was edible. But walking any great distance exhausted him, and his trips into the forest were invariably followed by him collapsing by the fire and sleeping. 

Then when he woke, the game must be skinned and gutted, and cooked, either roasted whole or stewed in his pot, and his firewood cut down to size, which tired him so much he would need to sleep again.

The first time it rained, the only way he could think of to protect his fire was to invert the washtub over it like a small roof, held up on a hastily-assembled ring of chunks of wood. He huddled in the storeroom, damp and shivering, while the rain came down, and knew he needed to find a better solution.

The next day, or at least, the next time he woke, he resumed his salvage operations on the house, working at the far end where his fireplace had been. The hearth had been made up of large, flat slabs of stone—too heavy for him to lift, in his current state, but he managed to drag one back around to the storeroom and inside.

Then he built a small fire on the stone, and lit it with a burning stick from the old fire outside. As long as he was careful about sparks, he could now protect his fire from rain, and heat his small shelter at the same time. That night, he got the first solid night’s sleep he’d had since the attack.

When he woke, actually feeling rested, he knew the worst was over. He had plenty of water, enough food to survive, and he could sleep warm and mostly dry. As the spring advanced, there would be more food available, and warmer weather. And every day he grew stronger, his stamina and endurance slowly returning. It was taking much longer than he was accustomed to, but the pain in his body was steadily diminishing, and the burns the hellbane had left on his skin were healing.

And as the work of survival became easier, he began to think more and more about Karen. After that first painful awakening, when he had hoped she was safe, he had…not put her out of his mind, exactly, but he had been forced to concentrate all his waking energy on more immediate concerns.

All the while, though, a weight had dragged at his heart, that was not simply from the loss of his home, or worry about his continued survival. Karen’s absence was a pain that only grew stronger, as the pain in his body grew less. He missed her, more than he ever would have thought possible a few months ago.

What was happening to her now, in the town below? Were her parents angry with her, as she had feared, or just glad to have their daughter back again, alive and well?

She must be mourning Matthew's death. The last thing he remembered before the hellbane had pierced his flesh and sent him plummeting into oblivion was her voice, full of anguish and horror, calling his name. For the second time in just a few months, she had witnessed a murderous attack on someone she cared for, and been helpless to stop it. He knew how she had suffered after her brother’s death, and it wrung his heart to think that she was grieving all over again, for him.

Would her parents be comforting her in her grief, or would they believe, like the men who had tried to kill him, that he was a dangerous beast? Was she suffering alone, even though she was back among her family and friends?

He needed to find some way to let her know that he had survived. But how? 

There was little chance of her coming up the mountain again any time soon. Which meant he was going to have to venture down into the town he had avoided all his life, and search for her.

And then, his conscience smote him. Once he had found her, what then? He truly had nothing to offer her now, not even a roof to put over her head. 

Those men hadn’t just taken from him all he had left of his parents—they had taken all he had to offer Karen, they had taken the home he would have shared with her and the happy life they could have lived here together. He felt the stirring of an old anger, bone-deep and familiar, at the senseless violence of humans. Wasn’t it enough that they had tried to kill him, as his father had been killed? Must they destroy everything else, too, and leave nothing but desolation and ruin?

How could he ask Karen to share this meager existence? Wasn’t she better off where she was, even if she grieved for him? Where she would never starve, or struggle to survive in the cold? 

He could give her nothing now except himself, and what was he? A homeless, ragged scarecrow, bitter, awkward and unsociable, who would be hated by anyone who knew what he was. Hated, and attacked, by any who were brave enough. Karen deserved so much better than that.

He nearly resolved to leave her in peace. But one simple fact made him think again.

The whole reason Karen had run away from home, the reason he had met her in the first place, was that her parents had tried to decide her future for her. They had chosen what they thought was best, disregarding her own feelings on the matter.

She was determined to choose for herself, even if that meant leaving home and safety and everyone she knew. Matthew might feel like he had no right to ask her to come back to him, now that he had nothing, but neither did he have the right to make that decision for her. The choice was hers.

And after all, he did have one thing to offer: he loved her, and she loved him. He wasn’t naive enough to think that was all they needed to make a life together, but it still counted for something.

He felt a new determination stir within him, calming his anger. Those men might have destroyed everything else, but he wasn’t going to let them destroy the precious possibility that he and Karen could still be together. He wasn’t going to give up hope without at least finding her and talking to her, and giving her the chance to decide for herself.

Once he had made up his mind, he was impatient to be gone. But first, he took the time to prepare a supply of food to carry with him. He was mostly recovered by now, but he still tired easily. Getting down the mountain was going to take him longer than usual, and he didn’t want to waste time hunting for food along the way.

When he was ready to go, he put out his fire, feeling a pang as he did so. But now that he was stronger, starting a new one wouldn’t be so arduous; and to leave it burning unattended was dangerous, now that combustible new growth was springing up in the clearing around his ruined house.

So he put out his fire, and started down. He listened carefully, all his senses alert, ready to hide at any sign of humans nearby. He knew they hunted the lower slopes of the mountain, and he grew more cautious the lower he went.

He didn’t dare enter the town openly, passing for human as he had done so often in other towns. He had no hat, no scarf to cover his eyes. More importantly, he couldn’t let himself be seen by any of the men who had attacked him. True, they had only seen him in his kodor form, but he still didn’t dare risk being recognized. If they realized the hellbane hadn’t killed him, they might try something that would—cutting his head off, for instance.

He was going to have to rely on darkness, and stealth.

Once he reached the foot of the mountain, he hid in the fringes of the forest, waiting for night to fall. He knew when the sun was down by the cooling of the air, and the sounds of nocturnal animals emerging from their homes to begin their nightly activities, but he waited a while longer before approaching the town. His best chance of going unseen was to wait until everyone was asleep.

He didn’t anticipate much difficulty in finding Karen’s home. He knew her father was a bookbinder, so all he needed to do was find the town bookshop. He’d been in enough different towns to know there should be a large main street, with shops on either side. If the bookshop wasn’t there, his job would become more difficult. But that was the obvious place to start.

The road from the mountain, as it turned out, was not the main street; but with a little careful exploring, he found that it intersected it. He knew when he’d found the right street by the size of it, wider than the mountain road, and by all the varied smells coming from the shops. The butcher, the baker, the tavern, each had their own distinctive smell. Tallow and beeswax for the chandler, herbs and goose-grease and spirits for the apothecary, different kinds of wood for the joiner.

What would a bookshop smell like? Leather, and glue, and paper and ink. It should smell like his mother’s books. He made his way carefully down the street, doing his best to block out the stronger smells and focus on the subtle, and eventually found what he was looking for.

He slipped silently around to the back of the house, and listened carefully. He could hear the sounds of two people sleeping on the upper level, but neither of them sounded like Karen. He frowned. Could this be the wrong house, after all?

The back door was bolted, but he found a window with a faulty catch and opened it as quietly as he could. Once he was inside, he stood still, letting his senses take in the room, trying to make sense of it.

At one side was a large bulk of…something, that he couldn’t identify. There were several tables running down the middle of the room, and lines strung above them with thin rectangles clipped to them, swaying gently in the slight breeze coming in the window.

The smell of books was much stronger here, and he quickly realized that the thin rectangles were freshly-printed pages, hung up to let the ink dry. He investigated the tables, and found books in several different stages of construction. 

Shelves on the far wall held supplies of paper and ink, leather and glue, thin boards and cloth, needles and sturdy thread, embossing tools and pots of what were probably different colors of pigment for more elaborate, painted covers. This was, undoubtedly, the bookbinder’s shop.

He found the stairs in the corner and went up, listening intently for any sign of waking in the two sleepers. But they slept on undisturbed as he made his silent way through the upper rooms. His inspection only confirmed what he had thought from outside—Karen wasn’t here.

Not anymore, that is. He found traces of her scent that told him she had been here, quite recently. The men who had attacked him must have brought her home to her parents—but what then? Why had she left again, and where was she now?

There were no answers to be found here. He quietly left the way he had come, closing the window of the workroom behind him.

The thought of searching the entire town was daunting, but it seemed he had little choice. He couldn’t very well break into every house, but he could listen outside. He spent the rest of the night walking the streets, his ears at full stretch, until the birds began to chirp and he knew dawn was approaching. Tired and frustrated, he withdrew back to the forest to hide, and think.

He hadn't had time to search the entire town, but he had found no sign of Karen anywhere he _had_ searched. He was willing to continue, for as many nights as it took, but what if she had left Fagan Corners altogether? If only he could come into town during the day, and talk to people! But quite aside from the risk of being recognized, he could think of no good reason for a stranger like himself to be asking about her. He would have to find another way.

He slept for half the day, and when he woke he had an idea. If he could somehow get back into the town unseen, before nightfall, when people were still awake and talking, perhaps he could hide somewhere and eavesdrop. 

The tavern would be a likely spot to hear whatever the town was talking about. Surely Karen Page would not yet have grown stale as a topic of conversation, given the dramatic circumstances of her return? And if the tavern failed him, he could try the Page’s house again, earlier in the evening this time, and hope to hear her parents talking about her.

The problem would be getting into town, and finding a good hiding place, without being spotted.

Luckily, the weather came to his aid. The temperature dropped, the wind began to gust, and soon a heavy rain was falling. Matthew hurried toward the town, trusting that nobody would stay outdoors in this if they didn’t have to.

He was drenched and shivering by the time he reached the main street, but that couldn’t be helped. It would be worth it if he could learn anything useful.

He made his way to the tavern by small lanes and back alleys, listening carefully and hoping no one would look out their windows. Apparently no one did, and he reached the yard behind the tavern in safety. He climbed up a wall as lightly as a cat, and settled on the tavern roof beside the chimney.

The bricks were warm from the fire in the fireplace below, offering him some comfort against the cold rain, and when he pressed his ear against it he found he could clearly hear voices in the room beneath him.

As he had hoped, a number of people had sought shelter from the storm here, choosing to wait it out before going home. He listened intently, trying to separate one voice from another, doing his best to follow multiple conversations at once.

They talked about many things, but thankfully, one of those things was Karen. He learned that she had definitely left Fagan Corners, but there was no consensus as to where she had gone. Each person with an opinion on the subject named a different town or city, which was less than helpful. They couldn’t all be right, and it seemed all too likely that none of them were.

He heard other things said about her as well, and himself, things that made him grip the chimney so hard in his anger that several bricks nearly came loose, and he had to force himself to unclench his hands and relax.

He had expected them to speak badly of himself, and had thought he was prepared to hear whatever they might say. But it hadn’t occurred to him that simply having spent the winter in his company would leave Karen open to the sort of wild speculation he was now hearing. He gritted his teeth, and made himself keep listening.

It seemed clear that she hadn’t run away again, that her going was planned and widely known, and that relieved him somewhat. From the sound of things, she was safe and unharmed, whatever these people might think of her mental health or her morals.

And she hadn’t been sent away in disgrace, despite the rumors circulating about her. Her parents were supporting her publicly, although some of the gossips opined that privately, they were glad to get rid of her. Regardless, no one seemed to expect her to return.

Once he had learned all he could, Matthew climbed down off the roof and headed for the bookshop. Evening was closing in, and he began to wish that the rain would stop. It had been useful to him, but once it was dark he would no longer need it. He was wet through, and cold, and he knew he would only get colder as night fell.

He found a hiding place near the Page’s back door, and stood listening. The front part of the ground floor was deserted, the Pages having apparently decided that no one was going to buy books during a rain storm. At the rear, one person moved about the workshop, while another person could be heard on the upper floor.

Matthew waited, willing his teeth not to chatter, until the one in the workshop finally finished their work and went upstairs. He waited a little longer, to make sure they weren’t coming back down, and then eased open the window. The smell of a freshly-snuffed candle greeted him, reassuring him that the work of the shop was finished for the day, and he slipped inside.

He kept his distance from the tables and the drying lines, not wanting his drenched condition to damage the books. There was a space in one corner, behind the unfamiliar large object, and he sat down on the floor there, where he could drip in peace.

Then he listened once more. The two upstairs were eating their dinner, making Matthew’s stomach growl, and talking. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem inclined to talk about their absent daughter. They talked about the bookshop, and the shocking rise in the price of candles, and whether or not the tanner was supplying them with her best leather, and many other subjects that held little interest for him.

He listened until the Pages went to their bed, and Karen was only mentioned once, when her mother said, “I wonder whether Beatrice will be able to find Karen a husband.”

“Time will tell,” the father replied. “Your sister can do it, if anyone can. She was born to manage other people’s affairs.” His tone was tolerant, if not fond.

“Let’s hope the girl will be less choosy,” said the mother, a note of bitterness creeping into her voice, “now that she’s learned what stubbornness can lead to.”

The father sighed, and murmured an agreement, adding, “This town’s never going to see her the same way again, that’s sure. She’ll be better off somewhere else.” The mother agreed quietly, and that was all they said on the subject.

Matthew thought about what he had heard, while he waited for them to fall asleep. It seemed Karen’s parents were well aware of the gossip circulating about their daughter, and had sent her someplace where it couldn't do her any harm. But it was also clear that they blamed her for…what, exactly? The gossip? Her brother’s death? Or both?

He remembered how she had blamed herself for Kevin’s death, and felt a wave of compassion for her, if her own parents blamed her, too. Yes, she might very well be better off somewhere else. And it seemed entirely possible that she might not come back. One way or another.

The news that someone was trying to find her a husband troubled him. She might love Matthew, but she also thought he was dead. He couldn’t expect her to remain single the rest of her life, for his sake. And as her mother had said, maybe she would be less choosy now, after everything that had happened.

Most humans seemed to want companionship, and Karen had just left her home, and whatever friends she had here, as well as her family. If she gave up hopes of a love-match, and settled for a marriage of companionship, he would never blame her. But if he could find her before that happened, she would know that there was another choice available to her.

On the floor above him, all was quiet. Karen’s parents were asleep, and it was time for him to leave. 

The rain had stopped, but the night was very cold. No sooner had he climbed out the window then he was shivering in his damp clothes. Before he left town, he decided to visit a few other homes.

The gossip in the tavern had told him, among other things, the identities of the men who had attacked him. Several of them ran businesses that he had passed by on his first visit, while looking for the bookshop, and he returned to them now.

He didn’t intend to hurt anyone, just to commit a little justifiable theft. These men had destroyed his belongings and tried to take his life; surely it was only fair if he stole a few of _their_ belongings, which they could replace far more easily than he could.

By the time he headed back to the woods, he had acquired a cloak and a hat, and he carried a sturdy satchel over one shoulder that held a change of clothes, a tinder box, a leather flask, a whetstone, a comb, a bar of soap, a pair of scissors, needles and thread, several knives in different sizes, and a scarf he could tie over his eyes.

He would have been glad to take money, if any had been ready to hand; but prudent businessmen kept their cash locked up, and breaking open locked boxes would be too noisy. No matter. He could get money, the way he always had.

He climbed the mountain in the dark, as he had so many times before, knowing it might be the last time. He had learned as much as he could about Karen here in her home, it was time for his search to move farther afield.

He might not know where she was, exactly, but he knew she was with her mother’s sister. His fingers tingled, remembering the feel of a comb carved with sea-creatures. A gift from her aunt, Karen had said. Her aunt, who lived near the sea.

Of course, she might have more than one aunt. But she had never mentioned any others. It was the only lead he had, so he would follow it to the sea, and search the various cities, towns, and villages that dotted the coastline. It was a formidable prospect, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He had to find Karen, the sooner the better.

Tonight, though, he would return to his house on the mountain. He wanted his axe, and his cooking pot, to add to his traveling supplies; and he really should rest before attempting a cross-country run. But tomorrow night, he would make for the coast, and begin his search.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, if I haven't responded to your comments, please know that I appreciate every one. I'm so happy that this odd little fantasy of mine is finding an audience! 
> 
> And when I say "little"...not only is this the longest thing I've ever written, it's now more than _twice_ as long as any of my other fics! Thank you all for taking the time to read!


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